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Rice Fritters

Rice fritters are small fried cakes made from boiled rice, flour, egg, and baking powder, served with a sweet vinegar dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Rice Fritters

Why it works: Rice and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 430 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Rice Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the fritters

  1. Mix the boiled rice, flour, salt, egg, and baking powder together.

  2. Form the mixture into small cakes.

  3. Fry the cakes in hot lard until golden brown.

Make the dressing and serve

  1. For the dressing, boil the brown sugar, water, butter, and vinegar together until thick.

  2. Pour the dressing over the fritters and serve.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Rice + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 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. Butter + walnuttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Flour and butter 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

Egg
Binds the rice and flour so the mixture holds its shape as small cakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas as it heats, helping the fritters puff and become lighter.
Flour
Adds body to the mixture, helping the cakes hold together while frying.
Brown sugar
Sweetens the dressing and adds molasses flavour and a deeper colour.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the dressing, giving it a smoother finish.

The step that matters

Boil the dressing until thick. Sugar syrup thickens as water evaporates and sugar concentrates. Stop too early and the dressing stays runny; go too far and it turns sticky or hard as it cools.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Sesamefits better
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

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