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Breakfast

Turtulongs for Breakfast

A ring-shaped dough of butter, sugar, flour, eggs and salt, rolled into rings and boiled until they float.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Turtulongs for Breakfast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a mixing bowl, combine the butter, sugar, flour, eggs (both yolks and whites), and salt, and mix until well combined.

Shape and boil

  1. Bring a pot of clean water to a boil.

  2. Roll the batter into pieces about 4 inches long and as thick as your little finger, then join the ends of each piece to form rings.

  3. Carefully place the rings in the boiling water, cooking only a few at a time.

  4. Remove the Turtulongs when they float to the surface.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender texture in the batter.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the batter brown slightly.
Flour
Provides structure so the batter holds its shape as rings.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure, moisture and richness.

The step that matters

Cooking only a few rings at a time. Adding too many rings at once drops the water temperature and makes the rings cook unevenly and become soggy. Keeping the water at a steady boil helps the rings set through and float cleanly.

“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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