Skip to main content
Main

Japanese Fritters

Japanese bread fritters served with a lemon sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Japanese Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fritters

  1. In a bowl, mix the eggs, milk, and sugar together.

  2. Pour the mixture over the cubes of bread.

  3. Roll the cubes in fine bread crumbs.

  4. Fry in deep fat until golden brown.

  5. Drain on brown paper and roll in powdered sugar.

Make the lemon sauce

  1. For the lemon sauce, cream together the butter, corn starch, and brown sugar.

  2. Add boiling water, lemon juice, salt, and nutmeg.

  3. Cook for 15 minutes, stirring constantly.

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 + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Lemon + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the milk and sugar mixture and set to give the bread a custard-like coating.
Bread cubes
Absorb the egg mixture, becoming soft and moist inside the crisp crumb coating.
Corn starch
Thickens the lemon sauce as it cooks with the boiling water.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and caramel flavor to the lemon sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the lemon sauce.

The step that matters

Fry in deep fat until golden brown. Frying at a steady, hot temperature browns the bread crumb coating quickly, so the crust sets and crisps before the soaked egg-bread interior overheats or absorbs excess oil.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, milk, sugar, bread, sauce, corn, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, milk, sugar, bread, sauce, corn, butter. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters203 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes