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Dessert

Doughnuts

A sweet fried dough made with butter, sugar, eggs, milk, nutmeg, flour, and baking powder.

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

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Doughnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mix the butter and sugar until creamy.

  2. Add the eggs and milk, then mix well.

  3. Stir in the grated nutmeg.

  4. Gradually add enough sifted flour to form a stiff dough.

  5. Incorporate the baking powder into the flour.

Shape and fry

  1. Flour your board well and roll out the dough to about ½ inch thick.

  2. Cut into pieces 3 inches long and 1 inch wide.

  3. Make a slit about 1 inch long in the center of each strip and pull one end through the slit.

  4. Fry quickly in hot butter until golden brown.

  5. Sprinkle powdered sugar on top before serving.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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 for tenderness and richness, and fries the donuts to a golden crust.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and helps it brown and become tender when creamed with butter.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and richness.
Milk
Adds moisture so the flour can form a workable dough.
Flour
Forms the stiff dough structure that holds the shape during frying.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lifts the dough so the donuts rise while frying.

The step that matters

Fry quickly in hot butter until golden brown.. Frying in hot fat seals the surface quickly and browns it before the interior absorbs excess fat. If the fat is not hot enough, the donuts soak up grease and turn heavy and greasy.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Jalapenofits less well
  4. Capersfits less well

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