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Dessert

Cream Puffs

A light pastry made from water, lard, flour, eggs, and baking powder, baked into puffs and filled with whipped or mock cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cream 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 dough

  1. Bring 1 cup of water to a boil in a pot.

  2. Add ½ cup of lard and stir in 1 cup of flour until combined.

  3. Let the mixture cool slightly, then work in 3 unbeaten eggs one at a time.

  4. Add a pinch of baking powder and mix well.

Bake and fill

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto a buttered baking pan.

  2. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 20 minutes.

  3. Once cool, cut each puff in half and fill with whipped cream or mock cream.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  3. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Flour and egg 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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the puffs together as they bake.
Eggs
Add structure and help the puffs rise and set as they bake.
Lard
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the dough.
Boiling water
Melts the lard and partly cooks the flour, starting the dough's structure.

The step that matters

Working in the eggs one at a time. Adding eggs gradually and letting the mixture cool slightly keeps the dough thick enough to hold its shape. Eggs added to a very hot mixture can scramble, and too much liquid at once makes the dough too loose to rise well.

“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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