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Dessert

Royal Fritters

A milk-based fritter with wine, sugar, lemon rind, eggs, and flour, fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Wine and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,157 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Royal Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curd

  1. Heat the milk in a saucepan until it rises.

  2. Stir in the wine and pour it out to cool.

  3. Skim off the curd and place it in a basin.

Make and fry the batter

  1. Beat the curd with sugar, lemon rind, eggs, and enough flour to make a stiff batter.

  2. Fry the fritters until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Drain well and serve on a hot dish with cut lemons.

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. Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Milk
Curdles with the wine to form the curd that makes up the body of the fritters.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help it set and brown during frying.
Flour
Stiffens the curd mixture so it holds its shape in the pan.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the outside brown when fried.
Light wine
Acts with the heated milk to separate the curd from the whey.

The step that matters

Skim off the curd and place it in a basin.. The curd must be well drained and separated from the liquid whey; excess moisture thins the batter and stops the fritters from holding their shape and browning well.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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