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Dessert

Cream Puffs

A light pastry made from a dough of water, butter, flour, eggs, soda, and filled with a sweet milk and egg custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Cream Puffs

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the choux dough

  1. Pour 1 cup of boiling water over ½ cup of butter in a saucepan.

  2. Place on the stove and bring to a boil, then add 1 cup of sifted flour.

  3. Boil for 5 minutes, stirring constantly.

  4. Let cool, then add 3 eggs and beat for 10 minutes.

  5. Add soda the size of a pea.

Bake and make the filling

  1. Bake for 30 minutes at 400°F (200°C).

  2. For the filling, combine 1 cup of milk, 2 eggs, ½ cup of sugar, and 1 tablespoon of corn starch dissolved in cold water.

  3. Cook until thick and flavor to taste.

Assemble

  1. When the puffs and cream are cool, open the puffs slightly on one side with a sharp knife and fill with the cream.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + corntop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Add structure and richness, setting the filling and binding the choux dough.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and melts into the boiling water to start the dough.
Flour
Provides the starch and gluten that give the dough its structure.
Corn starch
Thickens the filling so it becomes smooth and firm when cooked.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the filling and adds creaminess.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the filling and softens its flavor.

The step that matters

Beat the dough after cooling. The dough must cool before the eggs are added, otherwise they can scramble. Well-beaten eggs give the dough the stretch it needs to puff up in the oven.

“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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