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Dessert

Beignets De Peches

Fried peach fritters made with a batter of peach juice, brandy, and beaten egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and lemon work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 947 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Beignets De Peches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peaches

  1. Peel, stone, and halve the peaches.

  2. Sprinkle peaches with grated lemon peel and sugar, then drizzle with rum.

  3. Cover and let sit for 2 to 3 hours, then drain.

Make the batter

  1. Make a batter for fruit fritters using the liquor from the peaches.

  2. Fold in beaten egg whites until stiff.

Fry and drain

  1. Heat deep lard in a saucepan until boiling.

  2. Dip each peach piece into the batter and drop into the hot lard.

  3. Fry until golden-brown, then remove with a skimmer and drain on brown paper.

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. Peach + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together947 recipes

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

  2. Peach + brandytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together339 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Brandy + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Egg whites (in the method)
Beaten until stiff and folded in, they lighten the batter and help it puff when fried.
Peaches
The fruit is the main filling, and its juices flavour the batter.
Brandy or rum
Soaks into the peaches and adds aroma and flavour to the fruit and its liquor.
Deep lard
Fat for frying that browns the batter and cooks the fritters through quickly.

The step that matters

Frying at the right heat. If the lard is not hot enough, the batter absorbs fat and turns greasy; if it is too hot, the outside browns before the fruit heats through. Keeping the lard at a steady frying heat gives a crisp, golden coating.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peach, brandy, 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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