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Fruit Fritters

Fruit fritters are batter‑fried cakes topped with stewed cherries and plums.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and plum work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 406 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Fruit Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pit the cherries and plums, stew them, and sweeten with sugar.

Make and fry the fritters

  1. In a bowl, combine the flour, milk, and eggs to form a batter.

  2. Heat oil in a pan and fry spoonfuls of the batter until golden brown.

Assemble and serve

  1. Spread the stewed fruit on top of the fritters and arrange on a plate.

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. Milk + plumtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together406 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that sets as the batter fries.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help the fritters set firm.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the batter to a pourable consistency.
Cherries and plums
Add tart-sweet fruit flavor and juiciness on top of the fritters.

The step that matters

Fry in hot oil until golden brown. Hot oil sets the outside of each spoonful quickly and browns it. If the oil is too cool, the batter soaks up grease and turns heavy and oily instead of crisp.

Swap the plum

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, 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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