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Dessert

Boston Cream Cakes

A layered cake with butter, flour, eggs, milk, sugar, and lemon-flavored cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Boston Cream Cakes

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 choux batter

  1. Bring 1 pint of water to a boil in a pot.

  2. Add 1 cup of butter to the boiling water.

  3. Stir in 1 heaping cup of flour quickly until well combined.

  4. Let the mixture cool.

  5. Beat 6 eggs, separating whites and yolks.

  6. Mix in ¼ teaspoon baking soda.

  7. Add the yolks to the mixture.

  8. Add the beaten whites to the mixture.

  9. Drop tablespoonfuls of the mixture onto baking pans, spacing them apart.

  10. Wash the tops of the batter with egg white before baking.

  11. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) until fully done.

Make the cream

  1. Boil 1 pint of milk for the cream.

  2. Beat 3 eggs in a bowl.

  3. Stir in 1 cup of sugar and ½ cup of flour.

  4. Gradually stir this mixture into the boiling milk and let it thicken.

  5. Let the cream cool.

  6. Flavor the cream with lemon.

Assemble

  1. Cut one side of each cake open and fill with cream.

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. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Flour
Forms the starch structure that holds the batter and cream together.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, and the whites help the cakes rise and set.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the batter.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the cream, adding richness and body.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream and helps it thicken smoothly.

The step that matters

Stir the flour into the boiling butter-water quickly. Flour must be fully mixed in at once so the starch gelatinizes evenly and forms a smooth paste; lumps or slow mixing leave dry pockets and uneven texture.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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