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Dessert

Plain Apple Fritters

Fried apple fritters made with apples, sugar, suet, flour, and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Plain Apple Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix minced apples with sugar and chopped suet.

  2. Add enough flour to form a stiff batter.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat lard in a deep pan.

  2. Drop spoonfuls of the batter into the hot lard.

  3. Fry until golden brown and serve warm.

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. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

  3. Apple + flourtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,140 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Minced apples
Provide the fruit flavor and moisture that fill the fritters.
All-purpose flour
Binds the apples and sugar into a stiff batter that holds its shape while frying.
Suet
Adds fat that enriches the batter and adds richness to the fritters.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps the surface brown during frying.

The step that matters

Drop spoonfuls of the batter into the hot lard. If the lard is not hot enough, the batter absorbs fat and becomes greasy instead of crisping. Frying in hot fat seals the outside quickly so the fritters stay light and browned.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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