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Dessert

Curd Puffs

Curd puffs are fried curd cakes made with milk curd, eggs, sugar, rose water, nutmeg, breadcrumbs, served with a butter-sugar-white wine sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Curd Puffs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Drain the curd from the milk until dry.

Shape and fry

  1. Mix the curd with egg yolks, egg whites, sugar, rose water, nutmeg, and enough breadcrumbs to form a paste.

  2. Shape the mixture as desired.

  3. Fry the shaped curds in boiling lard until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve with a sauce made from melted butter, sugar, and white wine.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Rose + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Egg yolks
Add richness and bind the curd into a cohesive mixture.
Egg whites
Add structure and lightness to the paste as it sets during frying.
Breadcrumbs
Absorb moisture so the mixture holds together as a paste.
Curd (in the method)
Forms the body of the puffs once drained of excess liquid.
Lard
Conducts heat for frying, browning the outside to golden brown.

The step that matters

Drain the curd until dry. Excess moisture in the curd makes the paste loose and hard to shape, and it can spatter or steam in hot fat, so the curd should be drained well before mixing.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, egg, sugar, rose, butter, sauce, white wine):

  1. Cinnamonfits about as well
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Tarragonfits less well
  4. Gingerfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, sugar, rose, butter, sauce, white wine. 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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