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Dessert

French Puffs

A light pastry made from sweet milk, flour, eggs, and fried in lard, served with sugar or syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

French Puffs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Scald the milk.

  2. Pour the scalded milk over the flour.

  3. Beat until smooth.

  4. Whisk the eggs until frothy.

  5. Add the eggs to the flour and milk mixture when it has cooled sufficiently.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat a kettle of boiling lard.

  2. Drop 1 teaspoon of the batter at a time into the lard.

  3. Fry until light brown.

  4. Sift white sugar over the puffs.

  5. Serve with syrup.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 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

Flour
Forms the thick batter base that holds the puffs together.
Eggs
Add structure and richness to the batter and help the puffs set as they fry.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and gives the batter its soft, tender body.
Lard
Fries the batter quickly, browning the outside while the inside cooks through.

The step that matters

Add the eggs once the milk and flour mixture has cooled. Eggs added to very hot batter can scramble or cook unevenly, so the batter should cool enough that the eggs blend smoothly and the puffs set properly when fried.

“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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