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Dessert

Walnut Hill's Doughnuts

A doughnut made with sour cream or milk, sugar, butter, eggs, nutmeg, cinnamon, baking soda, flour, and fried in lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Walnut Hill's Doughnuts

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix sour cream or milk, sugar, butter, eggs, nutmeg, cinnamon, and baking soda until well combined.

  2. Gradually add flour until the mixture is stiff enough to roll out.

  3. Roll out the dough and cut into diamond shapes.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat lard in a frying pan and fry the doughnuts 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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  3. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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 to the crumb.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the stiff dough its body for rolling.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour cream to produce gas that lightens the dough.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the fried doughnuts brown.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the dough and carries flavor.

The step that matters

Gradually add flour until the mixture is stiff enough to roll out. Adding flour too quickly can make the dough tough and dense, while too little leaves it sticky and hard to shape. Adding it gradually lets you stop once the dough is firm enough to roll without overworking the gluten.

“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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