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Dessert

Plain Crullers

Plain crullers are fried dough strips flavored with sugar, spices, and lemon, then dusted with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon 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 ↓

Plain Crullers

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Whisk the eggs until very light.

  2. Stir in the sugar and about half the flour, along with the spices and lemon.

  3. Add the baking soda and enough more flour to make a soft dough.

  4. Do not knead; roll the dough into round strips.

Shape and fry

  1. Cut the strips into pieces about 3 inches long, double them, and twist.

  2. Fry in boiling lard, turning them to brown on both sides.

Finish

  1. Sift sugar over the crullers 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.

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  3. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Whisked to trap air, giving the dough lightness and structure as it sets in the fat.
Baking soda
Reacts with the dough to produce gas, helping the crullers rise and stay tender.
Pulverized white sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crullers brown in the hot lard.
Flour
Forms the soft dough structure that holds the shape of the twists.

The step that matters

Fry in boiling lard, turning to brown on both sides. The lard must be hot enough to set the outside quickly. If it is too cool, the crullers absorb excess fat and turn greasy and heavy instead of crisp and golden.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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