Skip to main content
Dessert

Crullers and Doughnuts

A sweet dough made with sugar, milk, eggs, butter, spices, and flour, formed into squares, cut, and fried.

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

Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Crullers and Doughnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Beat the eggs, sugar, and butter together in a bowl.

  2. Add the milk, spices, and baking powder, then mix well.

  3. Gradually add the flour, kneading until the dough is stiff enough to roll out to ¼ inch thick.

Shape and fry

  1. Cut the dough into squares and make three or four long incisions in each square.

  2. Lift the squares by taking alternate strips between your fingers and drop them into hot lard.

  3. Fry until golden brown, about 5 to 8 minutes, then drain on a colander.

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and richness as they set during frying.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its stiff, rollable structure.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lightens the dough so it puffs slightly when fried.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the fried surface brown.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the dough and enriches its flavor.

The step that matters

Fry until golden brown. Frying in hot lard sets the outside quickly and browns it. Too cool a fat soaks in grease and yields pale, heavy crullers, while the color signals the sugars have caramelized for flavor.

“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 →

You might also like

Cinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesCinnamon CakeCinnamon Cake42 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipes