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Dessert

Cream for Cream Puffs and Eclairs

A sweet custard filling for cream puffs and eclairs made from milk, flour, eggs, sugar, butter, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 for Cream Puffs and Eclairs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream

  1. Scald the milk in a double boiler.

  2. Mix the salt, sugar, and flour together; wet with a little cold milk.

  3. Stir the mixture into the hot milk and cook for ten minutes.

  4. Add the beaten eggs and cook for five more minutes.

  5. Remove from heat and flavor to taste.

Cool

  1. Let cool before using as filling.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, spoonable cream as it cooks.
Eggs
Add richness and help set the cream as it thickens with heat.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the cream that the flour and eggs thicken.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream and softens its flavor.

The step that matters

Cooking the mixture after adding the eggs. Starch in the flour needs to be fully cooked to thicken properly. Eggs can curdle or scramble if they get too hot too quickly, so keep the heat moderate and stir constantly.

“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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