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Dessert

Piecrust Doughnuts

A doughnut made from pie crust dough, eggs, sugar, and spices, fried in boiling lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,623 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Piecrust Doughnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Prepare sour dough by saving bits of pie crust, adding enough sweet milk to cover, and letting it sit in a warm place until sour.

  2. In a bowl, mix sour dough, eggs, sugar, salt, baking soda, nutmeg, and enough flour to form a stiff dough.

  3. Roll out the dough and cut into shapes, then let them rise on the board.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the doughnuts in boiling lard 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. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + nutmegtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together24,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Sugar + nutmegtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Sour dough
Acts as the leavening starter, giving the doughnuts their tang and lift.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the dough hold its shape while frying.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the fried surface brown.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour dough's acidity to produce gas for extra rising.
Flour
Provides the structure that turns the mixture into a stiff, cuttable dough.

The step that matters

Frying in boiling lard. The lard must be hot enough to brown the outside quickly while the inside cooks through. Oil that is too cool lets the dough soak up fat and turn greasy.

Swap the nutmeg

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

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

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