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Dessert

Jeanette S Puffs

A puff cake made from milk, butter, flour, and eggs, baked or fried, served with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Jeanette S Puffs

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the choux batter

  1. Boil 1 pint of milk with ½ pound of butter.

  2. Add ¾ pound of flour, stirring until it doesn't stick to the pot.

  3. Let it cool, then mix in the yolks of 9 eggs.

  4. Beat the whites to a stiff froth and fold them in last.

Bake the puffs

  1. Grease snowball-shaped tins or cups and fill them half full.

  2. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until golden.

Make Nannie's fried puffs

  1. For Nannie's puffs, boil ½ pint of water with ¼ pound of butter.

  2. Mix in 4 tablespoons of flour and stir well.

  3. Add the beaten yolks of 4 eggs, then the whites.

  4. Let it cool, then drop spoonfuls into boiling lard and fry until light brown.

  5. Sugar them while hot or serve with a little sauce.

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

All-purpose flour
Forms the starch structure that holds the puffs together as they cook.
Eggs
Yolks add richness and whites, whipped to a froth, lift the batter so it puffs.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the batter a tender crumb.
Milk
Adds moisture and browning from its milk sugars as the puffs bake.

The step that matters

Beat the whites to a stiff froth and fold them in last. Whipped whites trap air that expands in the heat, so the puffs rise. Folding gently keeps that air from deflating the batter.

“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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