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Dessert

Tea Puffs

A fried dough snack made from egg yolks, flour, and lard, dusted with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Tea Puffs

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Beat the yolks of four eggs until light.

  2. Mix the eggs into one pint of sifted flour to form a stiff dough.

  3. Take a small piece of dough the size of a walnut and roll it as thin as possible.

  4. Fold the edges together twice and cut through in several places from edge to center.

  5. Press the dough between your fingers in the center after cutting to prevent separation.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat enough lard in a fryer to nearly cover the dough pieces.

  2. Fry the pieces until brown on one side, then turn and cook until lightly brown.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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 binding so the flour forms a stiff, cohesive dough.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the thin dough together while frying.
Lard
Fries the dough quickly, driving browning and creating a crisp surface.

The step that matters

Pressing the center after cutting. Cuts run from the edge toward the center, and pressing the center together keeps the pieces from separating in the hot fat, so each piece stays intact while it fries.

“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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