Skip to main content
Main

Fkench Puffs

A fried puff made from milk, flour, eggs, and salt, served with sugar or syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fkench Puffs

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Scald the milk and pour it over the flour. Beat until smooth.

  2. Whisk the eggs until frothy and add them to the flour and milk mixture when cool.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat a kettle of boiling lard.

  2. Drop 1 teaspoon of the batter at a time into the lard and fry until light brown.

  3. Sift white sugar over the puffs or serve with syrup.

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 + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Provides the starch and gluten that give the batter body and set the puffs' structure.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, and whipped froth helps the puffs lighten and puff up.
Milk
Adds moisture and softness, and scalding it helps the flour absorb liquid and thicken the batter.

The step that matters

Dropping the batter into hot lard. The lard must be at a steady boiling heat before the batter goes in. If it is too cool, the puffs absorb fat and turn greasy and heavy instead of crisp and light. Frying in small spoonfuls keeps the temperature steady and lets each puff cook through and brown evenly.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes