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Dessert

White Fritters

A fried rice-based fritter flavored with ginger and candied lemon peel, served with sugar and orange‑flower water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

White Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Wash the rice and dry it before the fire.

  2. Beat the rice very fine in a mortar and sift it through a fine sieve.

Make the paste

  1. Put the rice into a saucepan and moisten it with milk, adding another pint.

  2. Set it over low heat, stirring constantly, and add ginger and grated candied lemon peel.

  3. Cook until it thickens to a fine paste, then let it cool.

Shape and serve

  1. Roll it out with a rolling pin and cut into small pieces, ensuring they do not stick together.

  2. Flour your hands, shape the fritters, and fry them until golden brown.

  3. Sprinkle with sugar and pour orange-flower water over them 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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Ginger + orangetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  4. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  5. Rice + gingertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,196 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Forms the body of the paste, giving the fritters their bulk and structure once cooked.
Milk
Moistens the rice and cooks into a soft, thickened paste that holds the fritters together.
Candied lemon peel
Adds bright, sweet citrus aroma and flavour throughout the paste.
Flour
Dusted on the hands so the shaped paste does not stick and browns during frying.

The step that matters

Cook the paste until it thickens. Stirring constantly over low heat keeps the starch from scorching or lumping, and the paste must be thick enough to cool, cut and hold its shape when fried.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, milk, ginger, lemon, flour, sugar):

  1. Raisinfits about as well
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, ginger, lemon, 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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