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Dessert

Feench Puffs

A light pastry made from milk, flour, eggs, and lard, fried and dusted with sugar or served with syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 ↓

Feench Puffs

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate 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 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 + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 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
Forms the batter's structure once it is beaten with the hot milk.
Eggs
Add structure and lift to the batter, helping the puffs stay light inside.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture and richness, and the scalding softens the flour for a smooth batter.

The step that matters

Frying the batter in hot lard. The lard must be hot enough that the batter sets and browns quickly on the outside. If it is too cool, the puffs absorb fat, turn greasy, and may not puff properly.

“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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