Skip to main content
Baking

Maine Doughnuts

A yeast‑free doughnut made with eggs, sugar, shortening, sour milk, baking soda, and spices, fried in lard and coated with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Maine Doughnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Beat the eggs and mix in the sugar and shortening until well combined.

  2. Add the sour milk, baking soda, salt, nutmeg, and lemon, mixing thoroughly.

  3. Gradually add flour until the dough is firm enough to roll out.

  4. Roll out the dough and cut into doughnut shapes.

Fry and coat

  1. Heat lard in a deep pan until boiling, then fry the doughnuts, turning often until golden brown.

  2. Remove from the lard and let cool, then roll in powdered sugar.

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 + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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 crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and helps the doughnuts brown during frying.
Shortening
Adds fat for tenderness and a softer texture in the dough.
Sour milk
Adds moisture and acidity that reacts with the baking soda.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk acid to produce gas that lightens the dough.
Flour
Provides the structure that lets the dough hold its shape when rolled and cut.

The step that matters

Frying the doughnuts. If the lard is not hot enough, doughnuts absorb excess oil and turn greasy, while overly hot lard browns the outside before the centre cooks. Turning them often helps them cook evenly to golden brown.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, milk, nutmeg, 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.

More doughnuts recipes

Raised 110Plain 25Potato 18German 17Isle of Wight 16Sour Milk 14 See all 168 →

You might also like

Delicate CakeDelicate Cake246 recipesBoiled FrostingBoiled Frosting69 recipesCitron CakeCitron Cake68 recipesScotch CakeScotch Cake63 recipes