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Dessert

Apple Fritters

A fried apple dish coated in batter and sprinkled with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Apple Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Melt the butter in a basin, pour in boiling water, and cool with cold water.

  2. In another basin, mix flour and salt, then gradually add the liquid until smooth and creamy.

  3. If too thin, add more flour and mix well.

  4. Beat the egg whites until frothy and stir into the batter.

Prepare the apples

  1. Prepare apples by peeling, coring, and slicing them into ½ inch thick rounds.

  2. Sprinkle apple slices with sugar and lemon juice, and let sit for 2 hours.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat plenty of boiling fat in a shallow saucepan.

  2. Dip each apple slice into the batter, then place in a wire basket and fry in hot fat until golden brown.

  3. Remove fritters and drain on blotting paper for 5 minutes.

  4. Serve piled on a hot dish, sprinkled with castor sugar.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Butter + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Flour
Forms the structure of the batter that coats and holds the apple slices.
Egg whites
Beaten in to add lightness and air, helping the batter puff and crisp when fried.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, contributing to a tender interior and browning.
Apples
Provide the main fruit body that softens within the crisp batter during frying.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the apple flavour and helps keep the slices pale.

The step that matters

Frying in hot fat. The fat must be plenty and very hot so the batter sets and browns quickly; if it is too cool, the batter absorbs fat and the fritters turn greasy and heavy.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, egg, sugar, lemon. 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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