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Dessert

Apple Fritters

A batter of milk, dough, eggs, flour, sugar, lemon peel, and sliced apples fried in lard and sprinkled with powdered or spiced sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,104 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

Apple Fritters

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine sweet milk and sweet light dough until dissolved.

  2. Add beaten eggs, salt, flour, sugar, and grated lemon peel; mix well.

  3. Fold in the sliced apples.

Fry and serve

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the batter into hot lard, ensuring each has a piece of apple.

  2. Fry until golden brown, then remove and sprinkle with powdered or spiced sugar.

  3. Let them stand for a few minutes to become lighter.

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 + appletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  2. Lemon + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and lightness as the fritters cook.
Flour
Forms the batter's body, giving the fritters their structure once fried.
Sweet light dough
Acts as a leavening starter, helping the fritters rise and become light.
Apples
Add moisture and sweetness, becoming tender inside the fried batter.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the exterior brown during frying.

The step that matters

Frying in hot lard. If the lard is not hot enough, the batter absorbs fat and turns greasy instead of crisping and browning. Frying at a steady temperature seals the outside quickly and cooks the apple through.

Swap the apple

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

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

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