Skip to main content
Dessert

Batter for Fruit Fritters

A batter of flour, salt, baking powder, milk, egg, and powdered sugar for frying fruit pieces.

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

Why it works: Flour and milk 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 ↓

Batter for Fruit Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix and sift the dry ingredients together.

  2. Gradually add the milk and beaten egg to the dry mixture.

  3. Prepare the fruit as desired (e.g., apples or bananas) and stir into the batter.

Fry and serve

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the batter into hot fat and fry until golden.

  2. Remove with a skimmer, drain on absorbent paper, and serve sprinkled with 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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Flour and milk 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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the batter together while it fries.
Baking powder
Releases gas during frying so the fritters puff and stay light.
Egg
Binds the batter and adds richness and structure as it sets.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and gives the batter its pourable, moist texture.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and a light finishing coat on the cooked fritters.

The step that matters

Frying in hot fat until golden. If the fat is not hot enough, the batter absorbs oil and turns greasy instead of crisping. Too hot, and the outside browns before the centre cooks through.

“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

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes