Skip to main content
Main

Swiss Fritters

A batter of flour, milk, butter, eggs, and salt fried in lard, served hot with sauce.

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

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Swiss Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Scald the flour with boiling milk to make a stiff batter.

  2. Beat until very smooth while warm, then add the butter.

  3. Once cool, stir in the milk and whisked eggs until thick and light.

  4. Gradually add the remaining flour and beat well with salt to taste.

Fry and serve

  1. Using a tablespoon, drop the batter into boiling lard, ensuring they do not touch.

  2. Fry until light brown on both sides.

  3. Serve hot with wine sauce, nun's butter, or your preferred sauce.

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

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Forms the stiff batter structure that holds the fritters together when fried.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add richness, helping it turn thick and light.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the batter for a softer, tender crumb.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and moistens the batter, with scalded milk helping the starch thicken.
Lard
Heated frying fat that browns the outside of the fritters.

The step that matters

Drop the batter into boiling lard without crowding. Fritters that touch can stick together and cool the fat, which lowers its temperature and leads to greasy, unevenly cooked results. Hot fat sets the outside quickly so each piece keeps its shape and browns evenly.

“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