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Dessert

Beignets De Pommes De Terre

A fried doughnut-like fritter made from mashed potatoes, cream, brandy, butter, and egg, dusted with flour and served with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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, then peel and mash them.

  2. Add salt, cream, brandy, and butter to the mashed potatoes.

  3. Incorporate the egg until the mixture is thick enough to form balls.

  4. Let the mixture cool, then shape it into small balls.

Fry and serve

  1. Dust the balls with flour and fry them in butter until golden brown.

  2. Serve with sifted sugar on top.

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 base that becomes the soft, fluffy body of the fritters.
Egg
Binds the mashed mixture so it holds its shape when formed into balls.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, keeping the mashed potato soft and smooth.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour, and helps the outside brown when frying.
Flour
Dusting forms a dry surface that promotes browning and a golden crust.

The step that matters

Shaping the cooled mixture into balls. If the mixture is still warm or too wet, the balls will be sticky and may fall apart. Cooling firms the starch and the egg so the balls hold their shape in the 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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