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Dessert

Apricot Fritters

Apricot fritters are small fried apricot halves coated in a butter‑flour batter and dusted with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Apricot Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Drain the apricots on a sieve until as dry as possible.

  2. Dip each half in castor sugar.

Make the batter

  1. Melt the butter in a teacup with boiling water, then fill the cup with cold water.

  2. Gradually add the melted butter to the flour, mixing to make a smooth batter.

  3. Just before using, add the prepared albumen to the batter.

Fry and serve

  1. Dip each half apricot in the batter and fry lightly in boiling lard.

  2. Serve heaped on a hot napkin with sifted sugar on top.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Apricot + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,458 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,630 recipes

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Apricots
Provide the fruit filling that is wrapped in batter and fried.
Flour
Forms the structure of the batter that coats the fruit and crisps when fried.
Albumen
Whipped or added to the batter to lighten it and help it puff during frying.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the batter.
Castor sugar
Sweetens the apricots and helps the batter adhere to the fruit.

The step that matters

Drying the apricots. Excess moisture on the fruit turns to steam in hot lard and can make the batter slide off or fry unevenly, so the halves should be as dry as possible before dipping.

Swap the apricot

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, flour. 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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