Skip to main content
Dessert

Fried Cream Puffs

Fried cream puffs are small squares of batter made with milk, sugar, flour, corn starch, eggs, butter, walnut, and vanilla, fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Fried Cream Puffs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Heat ½ pint of milk in a saucepan.

  2. Add ⅓ cup sugar, 2 tablespoons flour, 2 tablespoons corn starch, 2 eggs, and ¼ teaspoon salt.

  3. Wet the mixture with ¼ pint of milk and stir until thick.

  4. Remove from heat and add a walnut-sized piece of butter, 2 tablespoons broken walnut meats, and 1 teaspoon vanilla extract.

Set and cut

  1. Pour the mixture into a square cake pan and let it cool.

  2. Once cool, cut into 16 squares.

Coat and fry

  1. Wrap each square in egg and cracker crumbs.

  2. Fry in deep lard or oil until golden brown.

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. Corn + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together349 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 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

Milk
Hydrates the starches and forms the liquid base of the custard.
Flour
Thickens the mixture and gives it body as it cooks.
Corn starch
Thickens the filling so it sets firm enough to cut into squares.
Eggs
Help the filling set as it cooks and bind the coating around each square.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the coating brown when fried.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, tender mouthfeel to the filling.

The step that matters

Fry in deep lard or oil until golden brown. The fat must be hot enough to brown the egg and cracker coating quickly. If it is too cool, the coating soaks up oil and turns greasy, and the filling may not heat through.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, sugar, flour, corn, egg, butter, meat):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Walnutthe original
  3. Peanutfits about as well
  4. Beansfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, flour, corn, egg, butter, meat. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

You might also like

Vanilla Ice CreamVanilla Ice Cream108 recipesCorn CakeCorn Cake90 recipesCorn Starch CakeCorn Starch Cake89 recipesCorn CakesCorn Cakes22 recipes