Skip to main content
Dessert

Hollow Fritters

A sweet fritter made from lemon rind, sugar, flour, eggs, and fried in fat, dusted with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and flour 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 ↓

Hollow Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Boil the lemon rind with a pinch of coarse sea salt and a lump of sugar in 1 pint of water, then remove the lemon peel.

  2. Stir in 1 pint of flour mixed with a little water and cook the mixture until thick enough for a spoon to stand upright in it.

  3. Remove from heat, gradually mix in 4 to 5 beaten eggs until combined, and let the mixture cool.

Fry and serve

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the paste into hot boiling fat and fry until they are swollen and nicely browned.

  2. Drain the fritters on a hot napkin, serve piled on a dish, and dust with 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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the starch base that thickens into a paste and sets around the steam to give structure.
Eggs
Add protein that sets during frying and helps the fritters puff and hold their hollow shape.
Water
Hydrates the flour and turns to steam in the hot fat, helping the fritters puff.

The step that matters

Cooking the paste until thick. The paste must be cooked long enough to gelatinize the starch so it thickens and holds shape. Undercooked paste lacks structure and may collapse or absorb excess fat when fried.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, egg. 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

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes