Skip to main content
Main

Plain Fritters

A batter of eggs, milk, flour, baking powder, and salt is fried into golden fritters.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Plain Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs until light.

  2. Add the milk and salt.

  3. Mix in enough flour to create a thin batter that pours from a spoon. Beat until smooth.

  4. Add the baking powder to the batter. Mix thoroughly.

Fry and serve

  1. In a deep pan, heat the hot fat.

  2. Drop spoonfuls of the batter into the hot fat.

  3. When browned on one side, turn the fritter. Brown the other side.

  4. Remove with a skimmer and serve very hot.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 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
Provide structure and richness, setting the batter as they cook.
Flour
Forms the body of the batter, giving the fritters their structure.
Milk
Adds moisture and thins the batter so it pours from a spoon.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, making the fritters light and puffy when fried.

The step that matters

Drop spoonfuls of the batter into the hot fat. The fat must be hot enough to brown the batter quickly. If it is too cool, the fritters absorb excess fat and turn greasy instead of crisp and golden.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes