Skip to main content
Dessert

Blay Nuts

A sweet pastry with a marmalade center, made from flour, butter, sugar, eggs, milk, and fried in lard or butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Blay Nuts

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Rub the butter into the flour.

  2. Add the sugar, well-beaten eggs, and enough milk to make a proper consistency.

  3. Roll out the dough and cut into rounds.

Fill and fry

  1. Place a little marmalade in the center of each round.

  2. Roll into round balls.

  3. Fry in boiling lard or butter until light brown, about 15 minutes.

  4. Drain and sprinkle with sifted sugar.

  5. Serve cold.

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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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 structure of the dough that holds the marmalade filling.
Butter
Rubbed into the flour to add richness and a tender texture.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add richness and structure.
Marmalade
Provides the sweet, tangy filling at the centre of each ball.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the fried exterior brown.

The step that matters

Frying in boiling lard or butter. The fat must be hot enough to crisp and brown the outside quickly. If it is too cool, the dough absorbs oil and turns greasy, and the marmalade may not heat through before the surface over-browns.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes