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Dessert

Flour Gems or Puffs

A light batter of milk, egg, flour, and salt is baked into small cakes, with a dessert variant using butter, cream, sugar, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Flour Gems or 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.

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine 1 pint of milk, 1 egg, and ¼ teaspoon salt.

  2. Gradually stir in 1 pint of flour until the batter is light and free from lumps.

  3. Let the batter rest on top of the stove for a few minutes.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into hot buttered gem pans and bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until done.

Make the dessert version

  1. For a dessert version, melt 3 ounces of butter in 1 pint of cream and let it cool.

  2. Add 2 ounces of flour to the cooled mixture and beat until smooth.

  3. In a separate bowl, beat 4 egg yolks with 2 ounces of sugar and spices to taste.

  4. Fold in 2 beaten egg whites gently.

  5. Bake in gem pans or cups and serve immediately with jam.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the batter as it sets in the hot pans.
Egg
Binds the batter and helps the puffs set and hold their shape.
Milk
Provides the liquid that turns the flour into a pourable batter and adds moisture.
Egg yolks
Add richness and tenderness to the dessert version's batter.
Egg whites
Whipped and folded in to lighten the dessert batter and help it rise.

The step that matters

Pour into hot buttered pans. Batter poured into a very hot, greased pan starts to set and rise immediately, which helps the puffs form a crisp shell and release cleanly. Cold pans let the batter spread and stick.

“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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