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Dessert

Currant Fritters

Currant fritters are small fried cakes made with bread crumbs, milk, eggs, currants, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Currant Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Boil the milk and pour it over the bread crumbs.

  2. Mix in the butter and let it cool.

  3. Beat in the egg yolks, powdered sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and flour.

  4. Fold in the stiff egg whites and the currants dredged with flour.

Fry and serve

  1. Drop spoonfuls into hot lard and fry until golden.

  2. Drain and serve hot with a mixture of wine and powdered sugar.

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. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon 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

Eggs
Whipped whites fold in air, giving the fritters a light, puffy texture when fried.
Bread crumbs
Soaked in hot milk, they form the body of the batter and hold the fritters together.
Currants
Dried fruit that stays juicy inside the batter, adding sweetness and chewy pockets.
Milk
Softens the bread crumbs into a moist base and adds richness to the batter.
Flour
Lightly dusted on the currants so they do not sink, and helps thicken the batter.

The step that matters

Fold in the stiff egg whites and the currants dredged with flour.. Folding rather than stirring keeps the whipped egg whites full of air, which gives a light texture. Flour-dusted currants spread through the batter instead of sinking to the bottom of the fritters.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, flour, milk, egg, sugar, butter, cinnamon. 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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