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Dessert

Crullers

A fried dough pastry rolled, cut, and fried, then dusted with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Crullers

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mix 1 pound of melted butter and 1.5 pounds of powdered sugar until combined.

  2. Add 12 eggs, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, ½ teaspoon nutmeg, and ½ teaspoon mace, then mix thoroughly.

  3. Gradually add flour until the dough is stiff enough to roll out to ¼ inch thick.

Shape and fry

  1. Cut the dough into squares.

  2. Make 3 or 4 long incisions in each square.

  3. Lift the squares by alternating strips with your fingers.

  4. Drop them into hot lard.

  5. Fry until golden brown.

  6. Drain well before dipping in 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.

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. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cinnamon + macetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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 give the fried crullers their structure and richness.
Flour
Provides the structure that lets the stiff dough hold its shape when rolled and cut.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the dough and carries flavor.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and dissolves into the fat to smooth the dough.

The step that matters

Frying in hot lard. Hot fat sets the outside quickly and browns it, so the crullers absorb less grease. If the lard is too cool, the dough soaks up oil and turns heavy and greasy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, egg, flour, cinnamon, nutmeg):

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, flour, cinnamon, nutmeg. 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.

More crullers recipes

French 5Pastry 4Delicate 3New York 3Plain 3 See all 103 →

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