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Dessert

Nonpareil Crullers

A light, fluffy pastry made from butter, powdered sugar, eggs, spices, and flour, then fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Nonpareil Crullers

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Cream the butter with the powdered sugar until light and fluffy.

  2. Stir in the beaten yolks of the eggs, mace, and nutmeg.

  3. Add the stiffly beaten egg whites alternately with enough flour to form a stiff dough.

Shape and chill

  1. Roll the dough into a thin sheet and cut into shapes with a jagging iron.

  2. Place the cut shapes on ice for about 30 minutes to firm up.

Fry

  1. Fry the crullers in deep oil until golden brown.

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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Creams with sugar to trap air, giving the dough a light, tender richness.
Eggs
Yolks enrich and bind the dough; whites, whipped stiff, add lift and lightness.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the dough and creams with butter to create a light, fluffy base.
Flour
Provides structure so the dough holds its shape when rolled and cut.

The step that matters

Adding the egg whites with the flour. Folding the stiffly beaten whites in gently, alternating with flour, keeps the air bubbles intact. Overmixing deflates them, leaving a denser cruller and a dough that is harder to roll and cut.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, 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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