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Dessert

Delicate Crullers

A light pastry made from eggs, lard, sugar, and flour, shaped into small baskets and fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Delicate Crullers

Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Delicate Crullers

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, combine eggs, lard, sugar, salt, grated nutmeg, and lemon extract if using.

  2. Gradually add sifted flour until a nice dough forms.

  3. Roll the dough to about ⅛ inch thickness.

Shape

  1. Cut the dough into strips 1½ inches wide and 3 inches long.

  2. Use a giggling iron to cut slices across the strips, leaving ¼ inch from the edges and ¼ inch apart.

  3. Join the ends of each strip to form a circle, pressing down slightly to create a basket shape.

Fry and finish

  1. Fry the baskets in hot oil for about 5 minutes until golden.

  2. Remove from oil and sprinkle with white sugar.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour 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

Eggs
Bind the dough and add richness and structure as they set in frying.
Lard
Adds fat that keeps the dough tender and gives a short, crisp bite.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the fried surface brown to a golden color.
Sifted flour
Forms the dough's main structure once it is worked into a smooth mass.

The step that matters

Frying the baskets. The oil must be hot enough to set the dough quickly and turn it golden; if it is too cool, the baskets absorb oil and become greasy and heavy.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, nutmeg, flour):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, nutmeg, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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