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Two Recipes for Making Timbale Cups or Crust Cups

A small cup-shaped cake made with eggs, flour, milk, oil, and sugar, baked in a lard-coated mold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Two Recipes for Making Timbale Cups or Crust Cups

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the egg yolks and oil together.

  2. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff.

  3. Fold the beaten egg whites into the yolk mixture.

  4. Gradually add the flour and mix until smooth.

Fry the cups

  1. Heat lard in a mold until hot enough to brown bread quickly.

  2. Wipe the mold with a cloth to remove excess lard.

  3. Dip the mold into the batter, then immerse it in the hot lard.

  4. The cups will slip off easily; practice may be needed for best results.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 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. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Eggs
Whites trap air when beaten, giving the batter lift and a light, airy structure.
All-purpose flour
Forms the gluten and starch network that sets the batter into a crisp, sturdy cup.
Milk
Adds moisture and helps the batter spread and brown evenly in hot fat.
Oil
Adds fat that keeps the batter tender and contributes to golden browning.

The step that matters

Immersing the mold in the hot lard. The batter must hit hot fat so it sets and browns quickly; if the lard is not hot enough, the batter absorbs fat, becomes greasy, and sticks to the mold instead of releasing as a crisp cup.

“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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