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Dessert

Feitteks or Puffs

A sweet fried batter made with milk, flour, eggs, sugar, nutmeg, lemon zest, and brandy, served with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Feitteks or Puffs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a saucepan, bring 1 pint of milk to a boil.

  2. Stir in 1 cup of all-purpose flour until the mixture is very thick.

  3. Allow the mixture to cool.

  4. Mix in 6 beaten eggs, 1 tablespoon of sugar, ½ nutmeg, lemon zest, and 1 tablespoon of brandy.

  5. Beat the mixture well for 15 minutes until it is thicker than pancake batter.

Fry and serve

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the batter into hot lard and fry until golden.

  2. Sprinkle with powdered sugar or spiced sugar before serving.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 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. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

All-purpose flour
Cooked with hot milk, it forms a thick paste that gives the puffs their body.
Eggs
Set when heated, adding structure and lift to the batter as it fries.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour cooks into a thick paste.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the fried exterior brown to golden.

The step that matters

Beating the batter for 15 minutes. Long beating works air into the batter and develops its thick consistency. Batter that is too thin spreads and absorbs fat, so the puffs turn out flat and greasy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, flour, egg, sugar, nutmeg, brandy):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour, egg, sugar, nutmeg, brandy. 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.

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