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Dessert

American Dough Nuts

A yeast-leavened doughnut made with butter, flour, sugar, nutmeg, eggs, and milk, fried and dusted with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

American Dough Nuts

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Rub the butter into the flour.

  2. Add the sugar and nutmeg.

  3. Stir in the beaten eggs and yeast mixed with a little warm milk.

  4. Add more warm milk to form a light, smooth dough.

  5. Let the dough rise for half an hour.

Fry and finish

  1. Roll it out and cut into small shapes.

  2. Fry in hot butter or lard until golden brown.

  3. Drain well and dust with powdered sugar.

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. Butter + milktop 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. Flour + milktop 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

Flour
Forms the dough's structure once mixed with liquid and eggs.
Eggs
Add structure and richness to the dough and help it bind.
Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and become light.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderises the dough and gives rich flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and helps the surface brown when fried.

The step that matters

Fry in hot fat until golden brown. If the fat is not hot enough, the doughnuts soak up grease and turn heavy and oily. If it is too hot, the outside browns before the centre cooks through.

Swap the nutmeg

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

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

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