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Dessert

Cream Puffs

Cream puffs are choux pastry shells filled with a sweetened milk mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the choux dough

  1. Bring 1 cup of water to a boil in a pot and add ½ cup of butter until melted.

  2. Quickly stir in 1 cup of flour and mix until combined, then let cool.

  3. Once cool, add 3 eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.

  4. Drop batter by the teaspoon onto a baking sheet.

  5. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 20 minutes.

Make the filling

  1. Heat 1 pint of milk in a double boiler.

  2. Sweeten the milk to taste.

  3. Thicken the milk with the yolk of 1 egg and 2 heaping teaspoons of corn starch.

  4. Add any flavoring you prefer to the filling.

Assemble and serve

  1. Fill the cooled puffs with the milk mixture.

  2. Dust the filled puffs with powdered sugar before serving.

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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the puffs once the batter is baked.
Eggs
Add structure and help the puffs rise and set as they bake.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the dough and tenderness to the baked shell.
Corn starch
Thickens the milk into a custard-like filling.
Milk
Forms the base of the filling and adds richness.

The step that matters

Beating in the eggs one at a time. Each egg must be fully incorporated before the next is added so the batter becomes smooth and elastic. This lets the dough hold steam during baking so the puffs rise hollow instead of collapsing or staying flat.

“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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