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Dessert

Crullers

A fried dough pastry made with butter, sugar, eggs, flour, nutmeg, baking powder, and milk.

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 ↓

Crullers

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Cream the butter and gradually add the sugar.

  2. Beat in the egg yolks and then the stiffly beaten egg whites.

  3. Mix the flour, nutmeg, and baking powder; add alternately with milk to the butter mixture.

Shape and fry

  1. Toss the dough on a floured board, roll it thin, and cut into pieces 3 inches long by 2 inches wide.

  2. Make four 1-inch gashes at equal intervals on each piece.

  3. Pick up the pieces by running your finger in and out of the gashes, and lower them into deep fat.

  4. Fry 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. 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. Sugar + flourtop 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

Butter
Creamed with sugar to give the dough richness and a tender crumb.
Egg whites
Beaten stiff to add lift and airiness to the dough.
Egg yolks
Enrich the dough and add fat for a tender texture.
Flour
Forms the structure of the dough once rolled and fried.
Baking powder
Releases gas during frying to make the crullers rise and lighten.

The step that matters

Frying until golden brown. Fat that is too cool lets the dough soak up oil and turn greasy, while fat that is too hot browns the outside before the centre cooks. Holding a steady frying temperature gives even cooking and a light interior.

Swap the nutmeg

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

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

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

More crullers recipes

French 5Pastry 4Delicate 3New York 3Plain 3 See all 103 →

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