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Bread Fritters

Bread fritters are fried bread pieces soaked in milk, eggs, sugar, and flavoring, then coated and fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Bread Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the bread into desired shapes: squares, circles, or diamonds.

  2. Soak the bread in a mixture of milk, eggs, sugar, and your chosen flavoring until well soaked but not falling apart.

Coat and fry

  1. Roll the soaked bread in bread crumbs, then in the beaten egg, and again in bread or cracker crumbs.

  2. Fry the fritters in boiling lard until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve sprinkled with powdered sugar, with or without a 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. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Bread
Forms the body of the fritter, soaking up the milk and egg mixture to become tender inside.
Eggs
Bind the soaked bread and, when set in frying, help form a golden, cohesive coating.
Milk
Moistens the bread so it softens and carries the flavor through the fritter.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and promotes browning of the crust during frying.

The step that matters

Soaking the bread. If the bread soaks too briefly it stays dry inside, and if it soaks too long it falls apart and absorbs too much oil. Soak until saturated but still firm enough to hold its shape.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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