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Dessert

Potato Fritters

A fried potato dough flavored with wine, sugar, and cinnamon, dusted with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: White wine and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,083 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Potato Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Peel and pound the potatoes in a mortar.

  2. Mix in salt, white wine, sugar, cinnamon, and butter.

Shape and fry

  1. Roll out the mixture with flour and cut into circles the size of a wine glass.

  2. Fry the circles in boiling clarified dripping until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve with sifted powdered sugar on top.

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. White wine + buttertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Potato + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Mealy potatoes
Their starch gives the mixture body so it holds together when shaped and fried.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a softer, more tender interior.
White wine
Adds moisture and acidity that lightens the dough and brightens the flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown in the frying fat.

The step that matters

Frying in boiling clarified dripping until golden brown. The fat must be hot enough to crisp the outside quickly. If it is too cool, the fritters absorb more fat and turn greasy before they brown.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against white wine, sugar, cinnamon, butter, 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.

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