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Beef Fritters

Beef fritters are small fried patties made from roast beef, flour, butter, water, herbs, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Beef Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Chop the cold roast beef finely.

  2. Mix the flour, tepid water, and melted butter into a smooth batter.

  3. Add the chopped meat, herbs, lemon rind, nutmeg, salt, and pepper to the batter.

  4. Gently fold in the stiffly whisked egg white.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat a deep pan of frying fat.

  2. Drop tablespoonfuls of the mixture into the hot fat and fry until golden brown.

  3. Drain well and serve in a pyramidal form on a folded napkin or dish-paper, garnished with fried 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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg white
Whisked and folded in, it lightens the batter so the fritters puff and stay tender.
Flour
Forms the batter's structure, setting around the meat as the fritters fry.
Cold roast beef
Provides the main filling, giving the fritters their meaty flavour and body.
Tepid water
Hydrates the flour into a smooth batter that coats the meat.
Oiled butter
Adds fat for richness and helps the fritters brown.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg white. Whisked egg white traps air that makes the batter light. Stirring it in vigorously knocks the air out, so the fritters turn out dense rather than puffed.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, flour, butter, egg, nutmeg, pepper):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, butter, egg, nutmeg, pepper. 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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