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Sage and Onion Fritters

Fritters made from a sage and onion mixture, coated in flour and batter, fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,445 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Sage and Onion Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stuffing

  1. Mix chopped onion, sage, pepper, salt, and bread crumbs to make sage and onion stuffing.

  2. Moisten the mixture with clarified butter until it forms a moist pulp.

  3. Let the mixture cool and set.

Shape and fry

  1. Roll the mixture into small balls the size of a walnut.

  2. Flatten the balls.

  3. Dust the fritters with flour.

  4. Dip the fritters into batter.

  5. Fry the fritters in boiling oil until golden.

  6. Remove the fritters with a frying basket.

Serve

  1. Serve the fritters with fried parsley.

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. Sage + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,445 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Sage + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Onion
Provides moisture and savoury sweetness that flavours the stuffing filling.
Dried bread crumbs
Absorb the butter and bind the mixture into a shapeable pulp.
Clarified butter
Moistens the crumbs and adds rich flavour and fat for frying texture.
Batter
Forms a crisp, golden coating when fried in hot oil.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool and set. Cooling lets the buttered crumbs firm up so the balls hold their shape. Shaping or frying a warm, loose mixture can cause fritters to fall apart in the oil.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sage, pepper, bread, butter, flour, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sage, pepper, bread, butter, flour, parsley. 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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