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Dessert

Dough Nuts--a Yankee Cake

A fried dough cake made with flour, brown sugar, butter, yeast, and milk, shaped like a half‑dollar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
By Mary Randolph · From a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter 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 ↓

Dough Nuts--a Yankee Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Dry half a pound of good brown sugar, pound it and mix it with two pounds of flour, and sift it.

  2. Add two spoonfuls of yeast, and as much new milk as will make it like bread.

  3. When well risen, knead in half a pound of butter.

Shape and fry

  1. Make it into cakes the size of a half dollar.

  2. Fry them light brown in boiling lard.

By Mary Randolph. Recipe from a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg).

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. See the original page.

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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the dough that holds the doughnuts together.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a mild molasses flavour to the dough.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the dough when kneaded in after rising.
Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and become light.

The step that matters

Frying in boiling lard. If the lard is not hot enough, the doughnuts absorb grease and turn heavy and oily; if it is too hot, the outside browns before the inside cooks. Keeping the fat at a steady frying heat gives a light brown, cooked centre.

“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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