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Love-knots

Love knots are fried dough knots made with sugar, eggs, butter, baking soda, milk, flour, and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butternut and flour share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 37 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Love-knots

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix the sugar and eggs until well combined.

  2. Add the butter and mix until smooth.

  3. Dissolve the baking soda in the milk and add to the mixture.

  4. Gradually add flour until a dough forms.

Shape and fry

  1. Roll the dough thin and cut into small strips.

  2. Tie the strips into fancy knots.

  3. Fry the knots in hot 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. Butternut + flourtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together37 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 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

Eggs
Bind the dough and add richness and structure to the knots.
Butter
Adds fat and tenderness, giving the dough a rich texture.
Baking soda
Reacts with the milk to lighten the dough and help it rise.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together and sets when fried.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the knots brown when fried.

The step that matters

Fry the knots in hot lard until golden brown. If the lard is not hot enough, the knots absorb grease and turn heavy and oily. If it is too hot, the outside browns before the inside cooks through. Steady, moderate heat gives an evenly golden, crisp exterior.

Swap the butternut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Milletfits about as well
  4. Butternutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, butter, milk, 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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