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Dessert

Sweetmeat Fritters

Fritters made from candied fruit, butter, milk, lemon peel, flour, eggs, served with pounded loaf sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Sweetmeat Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Heat the chopped candied fruit with butter, milk, and grated lemon peel in a pan until hot.

  2. Stir in enough flour to form a stiff paste.

  3. Remove from heat and mix in the eggs, two at a time.

Fry and serve

  1. Once the mixture cools, form fritters and fry them until golden.

  2. Serve the fritters dusted with pounded loaf 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 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

Eggs
Bind the mixture and help the fritters set and hold their shape when fried.
Flour
Thickens the mixture into a stiff paste that can be shaped into fritters.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping the fritters brown in the pan.
Candied fruit
Provides sweetness and chewy texture throughout the fritters.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before frying. Adding eggs to a hot mixture can scramble them and make the batter loose or lumpy. Cooling it first keeps the eggs blended smoothly, so the fritters hold their shape in the hot fat.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, milk, flour, egg, 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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