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Potato Fritters

A fried potato patty made with potato puree, flour, butter, sugar, lemon, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter 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 ↓

Potato Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. While the potato is warm, mix the butter with it.

  2. Add the sugar, lemon juice and rind, and flour.

  3. Break the eggs over these ingredients and beat until very light.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry in lard in a frying pan, barely deep enough to cover them.

  2. Serve piled on a platter and sprinkled with 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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Potato + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

  3. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 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
Bind the mixture and, when beaten, add air that lightens the fritters.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and softens the texture of the potato mixture.
Flour
Gives the mixture body so it holds its shape in the frying pan.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the fritters brown lightly in the frying fat.

The step that matters

Beat the eggs until very light. Beating incorporates air into the eggs, which lightens the batter and helps the fritters stay tender rather than dense.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, sugar, lemon, 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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