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Dessert

Lemon Feittees

A fried cake made from egg yolks, flour, and lemon, served with a lemon‑wine sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 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 ↓

Lemon Feittees

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the whipped and strained yolks of the eggs with powdered sugar.

  2. Add grated lemon peel, nutmeg, cinnamon, and salt, then mix in the cream.

  3. Fold in the egg whites, then add the flour and mix quickly into a soft paste.

  4. Roll out the paste to about ¾ inch thick and cut into small circular cakes.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the cakes in hot lard until they puff up like crullers.

  2. Drain on clean hot paper and serve warm with the sauce.

  3. Mix lemon juice, grated lemon peel, powdered sugar, wine, and beaten egg whites to make the 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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Enrich the batter and add richness and colour to the paste.
Egg whites
Whipped whites lighten the paste and help the cakes puff when fried.
All-purpose flour
Forms the soft paste that holds the cakes together and sets during frying.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the batter and the sauce.
Lemon peel
Adds bright lemon aroma to the batter and the sauce.

The step that matters

Fry the cakes in hot lard. The lard must be hot enough to set the outside quickly so the cakes puff up rather than soak up fat and turn heavy. Cooking too cool makes greasy, dense fritters.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, cream, flour, sauce):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, cream, flour, sauce. 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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