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Dessert

Spanish Fritters

Bread slices soaked in milk, eggs, spices, then fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Spanish Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the soak

  1. Cut the bread into slices of your desired shape.

  2. In a bowl, mix the milk or cream, beaten eggs, nutmeg, cinnamon, lemon essence, and sugar.

  3. Pour the mixture over the bread slices and let them absorb the liquid without becoming too soft.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat oil in a pan and fry the soaked bread slices until they are light brown on both sides.

  2. Serve with or without sweet sauce.

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 + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Soft baker's bread
Soaks up the custard and fries into a soft interior with a crisp outer surface.
Milk or cream
Adds moisture and richness to the soaking liquid.
Eggs
Bind the soaking liquid and set when fried, giving the fritters structure.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown during frying.

The step that matters

Soaking the bread. If the bread soaks too long it turns mushy and falls apart in the hot oil. Soaking just long enough lets the bread absorb the custard while keeping its shape for frying.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, egg, nutmeg, cinnamon, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, egg, nutmeg, cinnamon, 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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