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Dessert

French Puffs

A puff pastry-like dough made from water, butter, flour, eggs, flavored with nutmeg or lemon peel, fried or baked and dusted with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,623 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

French Puffs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Boil 1 pint of water and ½ pound of butter.

  2. Once boiling, stir in ½ pound of flour until it leaves the kettle clean.

  3. Remove from heat and stir in 8 eggs, one at a time.

  4. Flavor with nutmeg or lemon peel.

Fry and serve

  1. Alternatively, heat rendered butter in a kettle.

  2. Dip a large teaspoon in cold water, cut dough into walnut-sized pieces, and drop into hot butter without crowding.

  3. Spoon hot butter over the puffs until they turn dark yellow.

  4. Sprinkle 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. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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
Add structure and richness as they set the puffed dough during cooking.
Flour
Forms the starch base that gives the dough its body and holds its shape.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and its hot fat cooks and browns the outside of the puffs.
Water
Turns to steam in the dough, helping the puffs rise and go hollow.

The step that matters

Drop dough into hot butter without crowding. Crowded pieces cool the fat and steam against each other, so they fry unevenly and may not puff properly. Hot fat sets the outside quickly, which is what lets the puffs expand.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits about as well
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Jalapenofits less well
  4. Capersfits less well

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