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Dessert

Beignets De Pommes De Terre

A French dish of fried potato balls mixed with cream, brandy, butter, and egg, dusted with flour and served with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Beignets De Pommes De Terre

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Roast the potatoes until tender.

  2. Peel the potatoes.

  3. Pound the potatoes with salt, cream, brandy, and butter.

  4. Add the whole egg while pounding until the mixture is thick enough to form balls.

  5. Let the mixture cool.

Fry and serve

  1. Shape the mixture into balls and dust with flour.

  2. Fry the balls in butter until golden brown.

  3. Sprinkle with sifted sugar before serving.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Potatoes
Provide the starchy bulk that gives the fritters their body and soft interior.
Whole egg
Binds the mixture so it holds together into balls when pounded and cooled.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor, and browns in the pan to give a golden crust.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, keeping the mashed potato mixture soft and smooth.
Flour
Dusted on the shaped balls to dry the surface and help them brown when fried.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool. Cooling firms the mashed potato and egg mixture so the balls keep their shape. Shaping or frying it while still hot and soft can cause them to fall apart or absorb excess fat.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, brandy, butter, egg, flour, 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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