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Dessert

Petits Fours Franqais

Petits Fours Français are small cakes made from egg yolks, sugar, flour, and flavored with citrus rind, baked in tins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Petits Fours Franqais

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the yolks of the eggs until light.

  2. Stir in the sifted sugar.

  3. Quickly fold in the stiffly whipped egg whites and warmed flour, alternating spoonfuls.

  4. Add grated lemon or orange rind or any flavoring to taste.

Bake and finish

  1. Drop the mixture onto buttered tins in tiny heaps.

  2. Bake until golden brown.

  3. Once cooled, cover with icing and decorate with nuts or bonbons.

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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the batter together.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the cakes a tender crumb.
Flour
Provides structure that sets as the batter bakes.

The step that matters

Folding in the whipped egg whites and flour. Fold quickly and gently so the air trapped in the whipped whites is kept. That air helps the small cakes rise and stay light. Overmixing deflates the batter and makes the cakes dense.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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