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Dessert

Dixie Cream Puffs

A pastry made of a sweet batter baked into small cakes, filled with a lemon or vanilla flavored cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Dixie 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.

Prepare the batter

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Beat the yolks of 5 eggs.

  3. Beat the whites of 5 eggs.

  4. Mix the flour, baking powder, and half of the sugar.

  5. Fill teacups half full with the batter.

  6. Bake the teacups until golden.

Make the cream

  1. For the cream, heat the milk in a saucepan until boiling.

  2. In a bowl, combine the remaining sugar, cornstarch, yolks, butter, and flavoring.

  3. Add the cornstarch mixture to the boiling milk.

  4. Stir the mixture constantly until thickened.

Assemble and coat

  1. Cut the baked cakes open.

  2. Fill the cakes with a spoonful of cream.

  3. Close the cakes.

  4. Roll the filled cakes in the beaten egg whites.

  5. Roll the cakes in granulated sugar.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Walnut + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

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

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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
Yolks enrich the cream and whites coat the cakes, adding structure and a light texture.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the batter together as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cakes rise and turn light.
Cornstarch
Thickens the milk mixture into a smooth, sliceable cream filling.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the cream filling, which sets as it thickens.
White sugar
Sweetens the cakes and helps them brown as they bake.

The step that matters

Stir the cream constantly until thickened. Cornstarch can settle and scorch on the bottom of the pan if not stirred, and it only thickens fully when the mixture comes to a boil while being stirred, so lumps and a thin cream can result otherwise.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, egg, flour, cream, milk, butter, walnut):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, flour, cream, milk, butter, walnut. 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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