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Beignets Glaces

Glazed beignets are fried dough squares dusted with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Beignets Glaces

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix flour with cream, egg yolks, and curd until smooth.

  2. Simmer the mixture until it reaches a thick batter consistency.

Set and cut

  1. Grease a plate with butter and pour the batter onto it.

  2. Let the batter settle and cool completely.

  3. Cut the cooled batter into squares.

Fry and finish

  1. Fry the squares until golden brown.

  2. Dust with sugar and glaze using a hot salamander.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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. Flour + eggtop 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

Flour
Starch and proteins that set into a firm structure as the batter thickens and cools.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help the batter set firm when cooked.
Cream
Adds fat and moisture, making the batter tender and rich.

The step that matters

Simmer until thick. The flour starch must be fully thickened by heat so the batter can set firm when cooled and cut cleanly. Undercooked batter stays soft, so the squares may lose their shape or fall apart when fried.

“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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