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Dessert

Orange Fritters

Orange slices dipped in batter and fried, then dusted with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Orange Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the oranges and slice them thin.

  2. Dip the orange slices in a batter made from the egg, sugar, milk, and enough flour to create a thin consistency.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat the butter or lard in a pan until very hot.

  2. Fry the orange slices until they are nice and brown.

  3. Remove from the pan and place in a dish, then sprinkle 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. 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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 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).

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

Eggs
Binds the batter so it coats the orange slices and sets as it fries.
Flour
Forms the thin batter that coats the orange and crisps when fried.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the batter brown in the hot fat.
Butter or sweet lard
Fries the coated slices, crisping the batter and browning its surface.

The step that matters

Frying in very hot fat. If the fat is not very hot, the batter absorbs oil and becomes greasy instead of crisping. Hot fat sets the coating quickly, so the fritters brown well and stay light.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Orangethe original

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