Skip to main content
Main

Egg Fritters

Egg fritters made by coating poached eggs with beaten yolk, cheese, breadcrumbs, and frying in clarified butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Egg Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Coat the eggs

  1. Brush the poached eggs with the beaten egg yolk.

  2. Sprinkle grated cheese over the eggs.

  3. Coat the eggs with bread crumbs.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the eggs in hot clarified butter for a moment.

  2. Serve with fried or crisped 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Cheese + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,130 recipes

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

  3. Cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

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

  4. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  5. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Poached eggs
Form the main body of each fritter, holding the coating together.
Egg yolk
Acts as a sticky binder so the cheese and crumbs adhere to the eggs.
Grated cheese
Adds savory flavor and helps the coating brown when fried.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp outer crust that contrasts with the soft egg inside.
Clarified butter
Conducts high heat for browning and adds a rich, nutty flavor.

The step that matters

Fry the eggs in hot clarified butter for a moment. The butter must be hot enough to brown the crumb coating quickly. If it is too cool, the coating absorbs fat and turns greasy, and the egg can overcook before the crust forms. Frying only briefly keeps the yolk-coated egg tender inside.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, cheese, bread, butter):

  1. Nutmegfits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Thymefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, cheese, bread, butter. 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 recipesMacaroni and CheeseMacaroni and Cheese102 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes