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Dessert

Fried Cookies

A sweet fried dough cookie made with eggs, sugar, milk, butter, nutmeg, flour, and lard, dusted with sugar.

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 ↓

Fried Cookies

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Beat the egg yolks and sugar together in a bowl.

  2. Add the milk, softened butter, and nutmeg, mixing well.

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

Fry and serve

  1. Roll the dough and cut it into narrow strips.

  2. Heat lard in a pan and fry the strips until golden.

  3. Dust with sugar while hot 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. Milk + buttertop 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

Egg yolks
Add richness and structure, helping the dough bind and turn tender.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a richer flavour in the dough.
Flour
Forms the gluten structure that holds the dough together for rolling.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the golden colour develop during frying.

The step that matters

Frying the strips until golden. The lard must be hot enough to crisp the outside quickly. If it is too cool, the strips absorb grease and turn heavy and oily instead of golden and light.

Swap the nutmeg

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

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

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