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Dessert

Cream Puffs

Cream puffs made from a dough of boiling water, butter, flour, baking soda, eggs, and a custard filling of milk, sugar, flour, and egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slow oven”. The 400°F in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the dough

  1. In a pot, bring 1 teacup of boiling water to a boil and add ½ cup of butter.

  2. Once boiling, add a pea‑sized bit of baking soda and 1 cup of flour, stirring constantly until smooth.

  3. Let the mixture cool slightly, then add 3 beaten eggs and stir until very light and smooth.

  4. Drop teaspoonfuls of the dough onto a buttered baking sheet, spacing them apart.

  5. Bake for 25 minutes in a hot oven (400 °F or 200 °C).

Make the custard and fill

  1. Make custard by boiling 1 cup milk, ½ cup sugar, 3 tablespoons flour, and 1 egg.

  2. Fill each cooled puff through a small opening with the custard.

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 puffs as they bake and giving them a light, airy texture.
Flour
Forms the starch and gluten framework that holds the dough's shape while the puffs rise.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor, and melts into the boiling water to enrich the dough.
Baking soda
Adds a small amount of leavening to help the dough puff and lighten during baking.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, providing moisture and creamy body when thickened.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool slightly before adding the eggs. If the dough is too hot, the eggs can scramble and the dough becomes too thin to hold its shape. Gentle cooling lets the eggs blend smoothly and the dough rise well 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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