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Dessert

Currant Fritters Without Eggs

A batter of flour, mild ale, sugar, and currants fried in lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Currant Fritters Without Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Stir the flour into the mild ale until it forms a thick batter.

  2. Add the sugar and currants, and mix well.

Fry

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the batter into boiling lard and fry until golden brown.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Flour + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,077 recipes
  3. Sugar + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and currant barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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 thick batter that gives the fritters their body and structure.
Mild ale
Liquid that hydrates the flour and, with the frying, lightens the batter.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown in the hot fat.
Currants
Provide small pockets of sweet, fruity flavour throughout the batter.
Lard
Hot frying fat that cooks the batter quickly and gives a golden, crisp surface.

The step that matters

Frying in boiling lard. The lard must be hot enough that the batter sets and browns quickly on contact. If it is too cool, the fritters absorb more fat, turn greasy and cook through unevenly.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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