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Dessert

Grandmother's Raised Doughnuts

A doughnut made by mixing butter or lard into bread dough, adding sugar and spices, letting rise, cutting, and frying.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Grandmother's Raised Doughnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Work the butter or lard into the bread dough.

  2. Add salt, sugar, and allspice, then knead together.

  3. Place the dough in a warm place until very light.

Shape and fry

  1. Roll and cut the dough into walnut-sized pieces.

  2. Lay the pieces on a board and let them rise again.

  3. Drop the dough pieces into hot lard, lower side up.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Bread + allspicetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together679 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Sugar + allspicetop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,938 recipes

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

  5. Butter + allspicetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,325 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread dough
Provides the yeasted structure that rises and becomes light and airy when fried.
Butter or lard
Adds fat that softens the crumb and gives a richer, tender texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the doughnuts brown evenly in the hot fat.

The step that matters

Letting the dough rise until very light. Yeast needs warmth and time to produce gas that expands the dough. Under-proofed pieces stay dense and can turn heavy or greasy when fried.

Swap the allspice

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Allspicethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, sugar. 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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