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Drink

Boiled Coffee

A beverage made by boiling coffee with egg white and water, then cooling and straining.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Coffee and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,239 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Coffee

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the egg and separate the yolk from the white.

  2. Put the coffee into a warm coffee pot, add the egg white, crushed shell, and enough cold water to dampen the coffee.

Brew and settle

  1. Add the boiling water and stop the spout with soft paper or a cork.

  2. Boil the coffee for five minutes.

  3. Move the pot to the back of the stove, add ¼ cup of cold water, and let it stand for ten minutes.

  4. Pour out ½ cup and return it to the coffee pot to remove any grounds lodged in the spout.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Coffee + eggtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,239 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Coffee
Supplies the flavour and aroma that the boiling water draws out of the grounds.
Egg white
Clings to fine grounds as it cooks, helping them sink so the coffee looks clearer.
Boiling water
Extracts flavour and colour from the coffee grounds during the boil.

The step that matters

Add the cold water and let the coffee stand. Cold water cools the surface and helps the grounds and cooked egg white sink, so standing for the full time leaves a clearer cup.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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