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Dessert

Yorkshire Fritters

A sweet batter fritter made with flour, powdered sugar, yeast, milk, currants, and eggs, fried and dusted with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Yorkshire Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix powdered sugar, salt, grated nutmeg, and flour in a bowl.

  2. Add yeast and milk, then beat until you have a thick batter.

  3. Stir in the currants, cover the bowl, and let it rise in a warm place for 30 minutes.

  4. Once risen, stir in the beaten eggs.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat butter or dripping in a frying pan.

  2. Drop spoonfuls of batter into the hot fat, keeping them apart.

  3. Fry until brown on one side, then turn to brown the other side.

  4. Drain the fritters and serve on a napkin, dusting 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. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the batter together as it fries.
Eggs
Add richness and help bind the batter and set it as it cooks.
Fresh yeast or german yeast
Produces gas during the rise, making the batter light and airy.
Milk
Hydrates the flour to form a thick batter and adds tenderness and browning.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit throughout the fritters.

The step that matters

Drop batter into hot fat, spaced apart. Fat must be hot enough to fry the batter quickly and brown it; cold fat lets the fritters soak up oil and turn greasy. Spacing them keeps the pan temperature up and stops them merging.

Swap the currant

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

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

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