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Dessert

Roi/al Paste, Called “ an Choux.”

A light pastry dough made from water, butter, sugar, salt, lemon peel, flour, and eggs, baked into small balls.

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 ↓

Roi/al Paste, Called “ an Choux.”

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the paste

  1. In a large saucepan, combine ½ cup water, ¼ pound butter, 2 ounces sugar, ¼ teaspoon salt, and the lemon peel; bring to a boil until the butter melts.

  2. Sift in flour gradually while boiling, stirring with a wooden spoon until the mixture pulls away from the sides of the pan.

  3. Remove from heat and mix in 1 egg at a time, ensuring the paste is not too liquid; you may need about 5 to 6 eggs.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the paste into balls about 1 inch in diameter and place them on a baking sheet, spaced 1 inch apart.

  2. Brush the tops with the egg wash and bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until fully baked, without opening the oven door during baking.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Butter
Melts into the boiling water to provide fat and richness, tenderising the pastry.
Eggs
Add structure and moisture, and help the baked pastry puff and set.
Flour
Gelatinises with the hot liquid to form a paste that holds the shape of the puffs.

The step that matters

Mixing in the eggs. Eggs must be added gradually, one at a time, and the paste checked for consistency. Too much liquid makes the paste slack and it will not hold its shape or rise well in the oven.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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