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Dessert

Grandmother's Doughnuts

A fried doughnut made from a batter of eggs, sugar, milk, butter, flour, spices, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Grandmother's Doughnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Beat the egg yolks with a little sugar.

  2. Add the milk, butter or lard, flour, salt, spices, and baking powder in the order given.

  3. Fold in the beaten egg whites last.

  4. Roll out the dough.

Shape and fry

  1. Cut into doughnut shapes.

  2. Fry in hot 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Eggs
Yolks enrich the dough; beaten whites lighten it and add airy structure.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dough, helping the doughnuts rise and become light.
Butter or lard
Adds fat for tenderness and a richer mouthfeel in the dough.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and helps the doughnuts brown when fried.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together when rolled and fried.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites last. Folding gently keeps the whites' trapped air intact, so the dough stays light. Stirring vigorously deflates the foam and produces denser doughnuts.

“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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