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Jolly Boys Fritters

A fried cornmeal batter made with flour, sugar, baking powder, egg, milk, and lard.

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

Jolly Boys Fritters

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine cornmeal, flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder.

  2. Beat the egg and add it to the dry mixture.

  3. Add milk gradually until you achieve a stiff drop batter.

Fry and serve

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the batter into hot lard.

  2. Serve with maple syrup.

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. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + milktop 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

Yellow cornmeal
Forms the main body of the fritters and gives them their characteristic grainy texture.
Egg
Binds the batter together and adds structure as it sets during frying.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lifts the batter so the fritters puff and turn light.
Milk
Hydrates the dry ingredients so they form a stiff, cohesive drop batter.
Sugar
Adds mild sweetness and helps the exterior brown in the hot fat.

The step that matters

Frying the batter in hot lard. If the lard is not hot enough, the spoonfuls absorb fat and turn greasy and dense instead of crisping. Hot fat sets the outside quickly so the inside can puff.

“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.

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