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English Puffs

English Puffs are fried batter made from milk, flour, eggs, butter, and lard, sprinkled with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

English Puffs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Boil the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in enough flour until the batter is thick enough for a spoon to stand up in it when cool.

  3. Let the mixture cool, then add the melted butter, salt, and eggs one at a time without beating.

Fry and serve

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the batter into hot lard and fry until light brown.

  2. Sprinkle sugar over the puffs immediately after removing them from the fat and serve at once.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Flour
Thickens the milk into a batter stiff enough to hold its shape when fried.
Eggs
Add structure and lift to the batter, helping the puffs stay airy.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour to the batter.
Sugar
Adds sweetness on the outside of the hot puffs.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before adding the eggs. Adding eggs to a hot mixture can scramble them and thin the batter unevenly. Cooling first lets the eggs blend smoothly, so the batter keeps the body needed to puff in the hot fat.

“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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