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Green Corn Fritters

A fried batter of corn, eggs, flour, and spices served with meat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Green Corn Fritters

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine the corn, salt, egg yolks, white pepper, butter, flour, sugar, and baking powder.

  2. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat deep fat in a pot.

  2. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture into the hot fat and fry until golden.

  3. Drain on brown paper and serve with fried or broiled chicken or any suitable meat.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they lighten the batter and help the fritters puff while frying.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the batter together.
Flour
Provides structure so the fritters hold their shape in the hot fat.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the fritters rise and stay light.
Butter
Adds fat for flavour and a tender texture.
Corn
Supplies the main bulk, sweetness and flavour of the fritters.

The step that matters

Fold in the egg whites gently. Stiffly beaten whites hold air that makes the batter light. Overmixing deflates them, so the fritters turn out dense instead of puffed.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Jalapenofits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, egg, butter, flour, sugar. 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.

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