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Apple Fritters

Apple fritters are thin apple slices coated in a batter and fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Apple Fritters

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel, core, and slice the apples thinly.

  2. Sprinkle the apple slices with sugar.

  3. In a bowl, combine the flour.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the egg yolk with the tepid water.

  2. Mix the yolk mixture into the flour to form a smooth batter.

  3. Fold in the beaten egg white until frothy.

Fry and serve

  1. Dip the apple slices into the batter.

  2. Fry in deep oil until golden brown.

  3. Sift sugar over the fritters and serve.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Apple + flourtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,140 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Flour
Forms the body of the batter that coats and holds the apple slices.
Egg white
Beaten until frothy, it lightens the batter and helps it puff when fried.
Egg yolk
Enriches the batter and helps bind the flour and water into a smooth coating.
Apples
Provide the fruit filling that cooks through inside the crisp batter coating.

The step that matters

Fry in deep oil until golden brown. The oil must be hot enough that the batter sets and browns quickly; oil that is too cool lets the batter absorb grease and turn heavy, while the apple inside needs enough heat to soften.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, 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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