Skip to main content
Dessert

Beignets Souffles. — Fritters Souffles.

A light, puffed French fritter made from a sweet batter of butter, sugar, flour, and eggs, fried in lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Beignets Souffles. — Fritters Souffles.

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Melt butter with lemon peel, orange‑flower water, sugar, salt, and water in a saucepan; bring to a boil.

  2. Add flour gradually to form a thick paste, stirring with a wooden spoon until it pulls away from the sides.

  3. Stir in the first two eggs, then add two more, mixing until the paste is soft but not too thin.

  4. Spread the paste on a dish to about the thickness of a finger.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat lard in a frying pan. Use a teaspoon to scoop walnut‑sized pieces of paste and drop them into the hot lard.

  2. Fry over low heat, stirring constantly until the fritters are puffed and golden.

  3. Serve hot, dusted with fine sugar.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

Flour
Forms the thick paste whose starch sets and gives the fritters their structure.
Eggs
Add protein that sets during frying, helping the fritters puff and hold their shape.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the paste a tender texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the fritters brown in the pan.

The step that matters

Frying over low heat while stirring. Constant stirring over low heat keeps the pieces from sticking and burning on the outside before the paste cooks through and puffs. Too much heat browns the outside while the centre stays raw and dense.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, lemon, sugar, 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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipes