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Dessert

Plum-cake Fritters

Fritters made by marinating sliced plum cake in sugar, lemon juice, and brandy, coating in batter, and frying.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and brandy work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 168 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Plum-cake Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Marinate the pieces of pudding with sugar, lemon juice, and a few drops of brandy.

  2. Prepare the batter, sweetening it with powdered sugar and adding brandy and lemon juice.

  3. Lift the marinated pudding pieces with a slice and lay them on a clean, dry cloth.

  4. Finish the batter with the whipped egg whites.

Fry and serve

  1. Dip the pudding pieces into the batter.

  2. Fry in boiling fat.

  3. Drain and dry the fritters.

  4. Serve the fritters in a hot dish sprinkled with 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. Plum + brandytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together168 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Plum + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together623 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Brandy + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,340 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Cold plum pudding
Forms the cake-like body of each fritter, holding its shape under the batter.
Egg whites
Whipped and folded into the batter to lighten it and help it puff when fried.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the batter and dusts the finished fritters for a sweet finish.
Brandy
Adds aroma and flavour to both the pudding and the batter.

The step that matters

Lift the marinated pudding pieces with a slice and lay them on a clean, dry cloth.. Excess surface liquid from the marinade would thin the batter and cause it to slide off or splatter in the hot fat, so the pieces should be drained before dipping.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (plum, sugar, brandy, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against plum, sugar, brandy, egg. 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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