Skip to main content
Main

Various Other Kinds of Fritters

A batter of soaked bread crumbs, eggs, butter, and optional sugar or fruit, fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Various Other Kinds of Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Pour boiling water or milk over the bread crumbs and let them soak for 1 hour.

  2. Beat the mixture with a fork, removing any hard pieces.

  3. Add the beaten eggs and butter.

  4. If sweet, add sugar, lemon rind, and juice, and optional fruit.

Fry and finish

  1. Fry the mixture until golden brown.

  2. If savory, adjust seasonings as desired.

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. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Form the body of the batter and absorb the liquid to set a soft, tender base.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the fritters brown in the pan.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown when fried.

The step that matters

Fry the mixture until golden brown. The batter is soft and wet, so it needs enough heat and time to set through and form a crisp, browned outside. Frying too gently leaves the centre soggy and greasy.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, egg, butter, sugar, currant):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes