Skip to main content
Dessert

Cream Puffs

A baked pastry made from milk, butter, flour, and eggs, filled with a beaten egg‑sugar‑flour mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Cream Puffs

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the dough

  1. Boil the milk with the butter in a pot.

  2. Mix the flour with a little cold water, then stir it into the boiling mixture.

  3. Let the mixture cool, then add the salt and eggs.

  4. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto baking tins.

Bake

  1. Bake in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C) for 20 minutes.

Fill the puffs

  1. Once cooled, split the puffs and fill them with the filling mixture.

  2. For the filling, beat the eggs and sugar together, then stir in the flour.

  3. Add the quart of milk while boiling, and mix well.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Flour
Starch that gelatinises and sets the structure of the puffs and the filling.
Eggs
Bind the dough and set as they bake, helping the puffs rise and hold their shape.
Butter
Adds fat that gives the dough richness and a tender texture.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness to both the dough and the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps it brown lightly.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before adding the eggs. If the paste is still very hot, the eggs will scramble instead of blending smoothly, and the dough will not hold together to form a hollow puff.

“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.

More cream puffs recipes

Boston 12Chocolate 3 See all 281 →

You might also like

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