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Dessert

Currant Fritters Without Eggs

A batter of mild ale, flour, sugar, and currants is fried in boiling lard to make fritters.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Currant Fritters Without Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Stir the mild ale and enough flour to create a thick batter.

  2. Add the sugar and currants to the batter.

  3. Quickly drop spoonfuls of the batter into boiling lard.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Flour + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,077 recipes
  3. Sugar + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and currant barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Mild ale
Provides liquid and carbonation that lightens the batter as it fries.
Flour
Forms the thick batter structure that holds its shape while frying.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the fritters brown in the hot fat.
Currants
Add fruity sweetness and small pockets of flavour throughout the batter.
Boiling lard
Fries the batter quickly, crisping the outside and cooking it through.

The step that matters

Quickly drop spoonfuls of the batter into boiling lard.. The lard must be hot enough to set the outside of the batter immediately. If it is too cool, the fritters absorb fat, turn greasy, and cook unevenly.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, 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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