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Dessert

Paste for Cream Puffs

A dough made from eggs, water, lard, flour, and ammonia for cream puffs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Paste for 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.

Prepare

  1. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

Make the dough

  1. In a saucepan, mix eggs, water, and lard until well combined.

  2. Add flour and grated ammonia, stirring until smooth.

  3. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly until the mixture thickens.

Cool

  1. Remove from heat and let cool before using for cream puffs.

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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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
Provide structure and richness, and add moisture that turns to steam during baking.
All-purpose flour
Forms the starch base that thickens with heat and gives the dough its body.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderises the dough and keeps it from becoming tough.

The step that matters

Cook the mixture until it thickens. Cooking the flour paste on the stove gelatinises its starch and drives off excess water, so the dough can hold its shape. Undercooked dough tends to spread and collapse instead of puffing.

“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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