Skip to main content
Dessert

Apple Fritters

Apple fritters are small fried batter pieces containing apples, eggs, milk, sugar, lemon, flour, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,104 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

Apple Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs until light.

  2. Add the sugar, lemon juice and rind.

  3. Mix in the milk, flour and salt.

  4. Fold in the chopped apples.

Fry

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture into boiling lard.

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. Milk + appletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  2. Lemon + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  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
Beaten eggs add structure and richness, helping the batter hold together when fried.
Flour
Flour forms the gluten and starch network that gives the fritters their body.
Milk
Milk adds moisture and thins the batter so it blends smoothly with the other ingredients.
Sugar
Sugar adds sweetness and helps the outside brown in the hot fat.
Apples
Chopped apples add moisture, sweetness and fruity flavor to the fritters.

The step that matters

Drop spoonfuls into boiling lard. The lard must be hot enough that the outside of each fritter sets and browns quickly. A fritter that enters cool fat soaks up grease and turns heavy and greasy instead of crisp.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, milk, lemon, 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 apple fritters recipes

Potato 3 See all 377 →

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes