Skip to main content
Main

Plain Fritters

A batter of eggs, milk, flour, baking powder, and salt fried into golden fritters.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Plain Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs until light.

  2. Add milk and salt, then enough flour to make a thin batter that pours from a spoon.

  3. Beat until smooth.

  4. Add baking powder to the batter and mix thoroughly.

Fry and serve

  1. Drop spoonfuls of batter into hot fat.

  2. When brown on one side, turn and brown the other side.

  3. Remove with a skimmer and serve hot.

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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the batter hold together while frying.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the batter to a thin, pourable consistency.
Flour
Provides the main structure that sets the fritters as they cook.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the fritters puff and turn light.

The step that matters

Adding the baking powder. Baking powder starts releasing gas once it meets liquid, so it should be mixed in thoroughly and the batter fried promptly to keep the lift even.

“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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes