Skip to main content
Dessert

Curraht Fritters

A batter of milk, bread crumbs, flour, eggs, currants, sugar, butter, and spices, fried in lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Curraht Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Boil the milk and pour it over the bread crumbs.

  2. Mix in the butter and let it cool.

  3. Beat in the egg yolks, powdered sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and prepared flour.

  4. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites and the currants dusted with flour. The batter should be thick.

Fry and serve

  1. Drop spoonfuls into hot lard and fry until golden.

  2. Drain and serve hot with a mixture of wine and 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Bread crumbs
Soak up the hot milk to form the body of the batter.
Eggs
Enrich the batter and, as whipped whites, lighten it so the fritters puff.
Currants
Add tart, chewy fruit pieces that stay distinct inside the fried batter.
Milk
Hydrates the bread crumbs and gives the batter a soft, tender body.
Prepared flour
Adds structure that helps the batter hold its shape while frying.

The step that matters

Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites and the currants dusted with flour.. Folding rather than stirring keeps the air in the beaten whites, which is what lightens the batter. Dusting the currants with flour helps them stay suspended instead of sinking to the bottom.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, flour, milk, egg, sugar, butter, cinnamon. 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.

You might also like

Bread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipesOrange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesCinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipes