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Dessert

Connecticut Doughnuts

A fried doughnut made with milk, butter, yeast, flour, eggs, sugar, salt, nutmeg, and lard.

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

Connecticut Doughnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a large bowl, combine milk, butter, and yeast.

  2. Add enough flour to create a stiff batter.

  3. Once the mixture is very light, incorporate the eggs, sugar, salt, and nutmeg.

  4. Knead in flour until the dough is soft like biscuit dough.

Shape and fry

  1. Roll the dough out to ½ inch thick and cut into strips.

  2. Let the strips stand until they are quite light.

  3. Fry the doughnuts in hot lard 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. Flour + nutmegtop 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. Flour + sugartop 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

Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough light and airy as it rises.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, and help the dough hold its shape.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the doughnuts brown during frying.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and rich flavor.
Milk
Provides moisture and hydrates the flour to form the dough.

The step that matters

Letting the strips stand until quite light. The yeast needs time to produce gas and expand the dough. If the strips are fried before they become light, the doughnuts will be dense and heavy instead of airy.

Swap the nutmeg

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

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

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