Skip to main content
Dessert

Boston Cream Puffs

A puff pastry filled with a sweet lemon‑flavored custard cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Boston Cream Puffs

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the choux paste

  1. Boil the butter and water together.

  2. While boiling, stir in the flour and let it cool.

  3. Beat the egg yolks with the baking soda into the cooled mixture.

  4. Beat the egg whites until light and fold them into the mixture.

Make the cream

  1. For the cream, boil the milk, then add the sugar, eggs, and flour, and flavor with lemon extract.

Bake and fill

  1. Bake the crust in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 15-20 minutes.

  2. When done, open the side of the puffs and fill with the cream, then pinch them closed.

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

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 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. Flour + milktop 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

Flour
Gives the puff dough its structure and thickens the cream.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the dough, tenderizing the crust.
Eggs
Set the structure as the puffs bake and add richness to the cream.
Milk
Provides the liquid and richness for the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream filling.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Beaten whites trap air that makes the puffs rise. Stirring them in roughly rather than folding gently deflates the batter, so the puffs bake flat and dense.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, egg, milk, sugar, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, egg, milk, sugar, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes