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Cream Puffs

A choux pastry puff filled with a sweet milk and egg custard.

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 ↓

Cream Puffs

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the puffs

  1. Boil water and butter together.

  2. Stir in flour, then remove from heat.

  3. Add eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition.

  4. Stir in baking soda.

  5. Drop spoonfuls onto a greased baking pan to form round cakes.

  6. Bake until golden brown.

Make the filling and assemble

  1. For the filling, cook milk, beaten eggs, sugar, and corn starch until thickened.

  2. Once cakes are cool, cut them open and fill with the prepared mixture.

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. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + corntop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

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

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

Eggs
Bind the dough and, as they set, give the puffs their structure and hollow centre.
Flour
Provides the starch and gluten that set the choux dough around the steam.
Butter
Melts into the boiling water to add fat and tenderness to the dough.
Milk
Forms the base of the custard filling, giving it body and richness.
Corn starch
Thickens the custard filling so it holds its shape when cut and filled.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard filling.

The step that matters

Bake until golden brown. Puffs need enough baking for the starch and egg structure to set and dry out; underbaked shells collapse or turn soggy once cooled and filled.

“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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