Why it works: Milk and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,053 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Dough Nuts
Ingredients
Directions
Rub the butter into the flour, then add lemon rind, salt, and sugar.
Warm the milk and pour it over the yeast with 1 teaspoon of sugar and 1 teaspoon of flour; cover and set in a warm place for 10 minutes.
Beat the egg and mix it with the yeast and milk mixture, then pour this into the flour and knead until it leaves your hands clean.
Set the dough in a warm place to rise for 1 hour.
Roll out the dough to ⅛ inch thick and cut into rounds about 2 inches in diameter.
Place half a teaspoon of jam on half of the rounds, wet the edges slightly, cover with the remaining rounds, and seal the edges thoroughly.
Drop a few at a time into hot frying fat and fry for about 1½ minutes or until they rise about 1½ inches thick and are brown.
Drain and sprinkle with caster sugar, then serve hot.
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.
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Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together19,053 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together53,532 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together77,875 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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
Swap the lemon
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, sugar):
- Vanillafits better
- Figfits better
- Peachfits better
- Lemonthe original
Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.
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