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Dessert

Molly Puffs

Molly Puffs are fried dough cakes made from cornmeal, rye flour, eggs, brown sugar, and baking soda, cooked in boiling lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Rye and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,320 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Molly Puffs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Scald the cornmeal and let it cool.

  2. Add the rye flour, eggs, brown sugar, and baking soda to the cooled cornmeal.

Fry

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture into boiling lard and fry 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. Rye + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,320 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. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Rye + sugartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together535 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Cornmeal
Scalding softens the cornmeal and gives the puffs a tender, porridge-like body.
Rye flour
Provides the main structure and flavour of the batter.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add richness and structure as it sets.
Baking soda
Reacts to lift the batter so the puffs rise while frying.

The step that matters

Frying the spoonfuls in boiling lard. The lard must be hot enough to set the outside quickly. If it is too cool, the batter soaks up fat and turns greasy and dense instead of puffing and browning.

“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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