Skip to main content
Dessert

French Crullers

A fried dough pastry made with eggs, milk, butter, sugar, salt, and flour, cut into small shapes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

French Crullers

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Rub together the melted butter, salt, and sugar in a bowl.

  2. Add the well-beaten eggs and milk, mixing until combined.

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

  4. Roll the dough to ½ inch thick and cut out shapes with a small cake cutter that has a hole in the center.

Fry

  1. Fry the cutouts in hot lard 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 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).

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

Eggs
Bind the dough and add richness and structure as they set in the frying fat.
Flour
Thickens the mixture so it can be rolled out and hold its cut shape.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and rich flavor in the dough.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crullers brown in the hot fat.

The step that matters

Frying the cutouts in hot lard until golden brown. If the lard is not hot enough, the dough absorbs fat and turns greasy and heavy; if it is too hot, the outside browns before the inside cooks through. Steady, moderate heat gives a crisp exterior and a cooked center.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes