Skip to main content
Baking

French Fritters

French fritters are a batter-based fried dish made with milk, flour, eggs, salt, and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
French Fritters

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 ↓

French Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Boil half of the milk in a pot.

  2. Mix the other half of the milk cold with the flour.

  3. Thicken the boiling milk with the flour mixture and cook until well done.

  4. While cooling, beat the eggs until light.

Finish the batter

  1. Add the salt to the batter.

  2. Incorporate the eggs into the batter, one spoonful at a time.

Fry and drain

  1. Heat a small kettle half full of boiling lard.

  2. Drop spoonfuls of batter into the lard to fry.

  3. Remove fritters before they turn dark and place them in a drainer.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + eggtop 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

Flour
Starch that thickens the milk and gives the batter its body and structure.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, and lighten the batter when beaten.
Milk
Supplies the liquid that hydrates the flour and keeps the fritters moist.
Lard
Frying fat that cooks the batter quickly and browns the outside.

The step that matters

Thicken the boiling milk with the flour mixture and cook until well done.. Starch in flour swells and thickens when heated in liquid, so cooking the paste fully gives a batter that holds its shape. Undercooked flour leaves a raw, pasty taste and a weak texture in the fried fritters.

“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

Delicate CakeDelicate Cake246 recipesBoiled FrostingBoiled Frosting69 recipesCitron CakeCitron Cake68 recipesScotch CakeScotch Cake63 recipes