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Bread Fritters

Bread fritters made by soaking stale bread in egg yolk and milk, then frying in butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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. Beat the egg yolks and mix with the milk.

  2. Cut the stale bread into slices and pour the egg mixture over them.

  3. Let the bread steep in the mixture for 1 hour.

Fry

  1. Fry the soaked bread slices in butter until golden brown.

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

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

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Enrich the soak and help the fritters set and brown when fried.
Milk
Moistens the bread and carries the egg into its soft interior.
Stale bread
Dry crumb soaks up the custard, giving a tender centre inside a crisp crust.
Butter
Fat for frying that browns the outside and adds flavour.

The step that matters

Fry the soaked bread slices in butter until golden brown. Frying over moderate heat lets the egg coating set and brown before the soaked bread turns soggy or burns. Excess liquid in the bread can make the fritters greasy or fall apart.

“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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