Skip to main content
Dessert

French Puffs

A fried puff pastry made from milk, flour, eggs, and sugar, served with sifted sugar and optional preserve.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

French Puffs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Boil 1 cup of milk and mix the other cup smoothly with the flour.

  2. Add the flour mixture to the boiling milk and cook until it forms a stiff paste.

  3. Let the paste cool, then beat in the egg yolks, egg whites, and sugar until light and fluffy.

Fry and serve

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

  2. Serve with sifted sugar on top and a little preserve if desired.

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 starch paste that gives the batter its body and holds its shape.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the batter while enriching its texture.
Egg whites
Whipped into the batter, they trap air that makes the fritters light and fluffy.
Milk
Adds moisture and softness to the paste and helps it cook into a smooth base.

The step that matters

Let the paste cool before beating in the eggs. If the paste is still very hot, the egg yolks and whites can scramble or thin out instead of blending smoothly. Cooling first keeps the batter smooth and lets the whites hold air for a light, fluffy texture.

“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

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes