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Dessert

Royal Fritters

A sweet fritter made from curd, eggs, milk, wine, flour, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,623 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Royal Fritters

Oven, in the book's wordsA slack oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curd

  1. Pour 1 quart of fresh milk into a saucepan and bring it to a boil.

  2. Add 1 pint of white wine, remove from heat, and let it stand for 5-6 minutes.

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

Make the batter and fry

  1. Mix the curd with 6 eggs and season with nutmeg.

  2. Beat the mixture with a whisk and add enough flour to achieve a batter-like thickness.

  3. Add sugar to taste and fry the mixture quickly.

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. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  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
Forms the curd, which provides the bulk of the fritter mixture.
White wine
Acidity causes the milk to separate into curds and whey.
Eggs
Bind the curd and set when fried, giving the fritters structure.
Flour
Thickens the mixture to a batter-like consistency that holds its shape when fried.

The step that matters

Fry the mixture quickly. Frying quickly over sufficient heat sets the egg and flour outside while keeping the inside moist, so the fritters do not turn dry or spread into greasy, undercooked pieces.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits about as well
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Jalapenofits less well
  4. Tarragonfits less well

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