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Dessert

New Orleans Jumbles

A sweet pastry made with flour, sugar, butter, nutmeg, orange and lemon rinds, and eggs, formed into rings and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

New Orleans Jumbles

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a large bowl, combine flour, sugar, butter, nutmeg, orange rind, and lemon rind; mix until well combined.

  3. Add the eggs to the dough and work them in thoroughly.

Shape and bake

  1. Dust a clean surface with fine white sugar.

  2. Take a small piece of dough, roll it into a ring, and join the ends.

  3. Place the rings on a clean baking sheet or in a Dutch oven.

  4. Bake for a few minutes until golden, then carefully remove with a knife blade.

  5. Let cool on a dish before packing away.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  3. Nutmeg + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,746 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Provides the structure that holds the rings together as they bake.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender, crumbly texture and rich flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown as the rings bake.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add moisture and richness to the rings.
Nutmeg
Adds warm, aromatic flavour to the dough.

The step that matters

Baking time and removal. The rings bake only a few minutes, so they can go from pale to over-browned quickly. Removing them once golden keeps them tender rather than dry and hard as they cool.

Swap the orange

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

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

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