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Dessert

Raspberry Puffs

A steamed pastry filled with raspberry jam or cherries, made with butter, sugar, flour, corn starch, baking powder, salt, eggs, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Raspberry Puffs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream together the butter and sugar.

  2. Sift in the flour, corn starch, baking powder, and salt.

  3. Beat the eggs and add the milk, then mix everything together.

Assemble and cook

  1. Butter six or seven earthenware cups.

  2. Place a tablespoon of raspberry jam or pitted cherries in the bottom of each cup.

  3. Add a generous tablespoon of batter on top of the jam or cherries.

  4. Cook in a steamer for 45 minutes to 1 hour.

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. Corn + milktop 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. Milk + raspberrytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,014 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 batter and provide structure as they set during cooking.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the batter as it sets.
Baking powder
Releases gas that makes the puffs rise and lighten.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the batter.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the batter brown lightly.
Corn starch
Softens the crumb, giving a more tender texture.

The step that matters

Cook in a steamer for 45 minutes to 1 hour. Steaming cooks the batter gently and evenly with moist heat, so the puffs rise and set through without drying out. Cooking too hard or too briefly can leave them dense or underdone in the centre.

Swap the raspberry

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, flour, corn, egg, milk. 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.

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