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Dessert

Bread Fritters

A sweet fried batter made with currants, flour, milk, butter, nutmeg, sugar, brandy, eggs, and fried in lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Bread Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dredge currants with flour and set aside.

  2. Grate bread into a pan until you have 1 pint of crumbs.

  3. Pour boiling milk over the crumbs and stir in butter; cover and let stand for 1 hour.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the mixture thoroughly, then add grated nutmeg, powdered sugar, and brandy.

  2. Beat eggs until light and stir them gradually into the mixture.

  3. Add currants a few at a time and mix until combined.

  4. Adjust the batter consistency with flour if too thin.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat lard in a frying pan and drop in large spoonfuls of batter.

  2. Fry fritters until light brown, then drain on a skimmer or inverted sieve.

  3. Serve hot with wine and 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Currant + brandytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Beaten eggs lighten the batter and help bind the fritters as they set.
Bread crumbs
Soaked in hot milk, they form the body of the batter and absorb moisture.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the batter.
Currants
Provide chewy pockets of sweetness throughout the fritters.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the batter and promotes light browning in the hot lard.

The step that matters

Adjusting the batter consistency. A batter that is too thin spreads and absorbs excess fat, producing greasy, flat fritters. Adding flour only as needed restores body so the spoonfuls hold their shape in the hot lard.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, bread, milk, butter, nutmeg, sugar, brandy. 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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