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Dessert

Raised Doughnuts

A sweet yeast doughnut made with butter or lard, cinnamon, nutmeg, and fried in lard, dusted with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Raised Doughnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Make a sponge by mixing warm water or milk with yeast.

  2. Once the sponge is very light, add butter or lard, sugar, salt, baking soda dissolved in a little water, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

  3. Stir in the beaten eggs and add sifted flour until the dough is the consistency of biscuit dough.

  4. Knead the dough well, cover it, and let it rise.

Shape and fry

  1. Roll the dough out to a thickness of ½ inch and cut into small shapes or strips.

  2. Place the cut dough on greased tins, cover, and let rise again.

  3. Fry the dough in very hot lard until golden brown.

  4. Dust with powdered sugar while warm.

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Yeast
Ferments the sponge so the dough rises light and airy.
Eggs
Add richness and help bind the dough.
Butter or sweet lard
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the dough.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the fried surface brown.
Sifted flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together.

The step that matters

Frying in very hot lard. If the lard is not very hot, the dough absorbs fat and turns greasy before the outside browns. Very hot fat sets the surface quickly, so the doughnut cooks through with a golden crust and less oil soaked in.

“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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