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Cream Puffs

Cream puffs made from choux pastry filled with a milk‑cornstarch custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 dough

  1. Melt butter and add hot water, bring to a boil.

  2. Add flour all at once, stir rapidly until mixture pulls away from sides.

  3. Remove from heat and let cool on ice.

  4. Stir in eggs one at a time without beating; after last egg, beat until well mixed.

  5. Cover and let stand for an hour.

Bake the shells

  1. Grease baking pan with butter and drop spoonfuls of mixture onto pan, ensuring they do not touch.

  2. Bake in preheated oven at 400°F until done.

Make the filling

  1. Heat milk in saucepan and stir in cornstarch.

  2. Beat eggs with sugar and stir in hot milk mixture.

  3. Let filling thicken, then fill the 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 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).

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
Provide structure and richness, setting the filling and helping the puffs rise.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the dough and helps prevent sticking on the pan.
Pastry flour
Forms the starch framework of the dough that holds the puffs together.
Cornstarch
Thickens the milk mixture into a custard-like filling as it heats.
Milk
Provides moisture and richness to the filling.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the filling.

The step that matters

Adding the eggs to the dough. Eggs must be stirred in gradually and the dough cooled first; if the mixture is too hot the eggs scramble and the dough loses the thickness needed to hold its shape and rise 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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