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Dessert

Queen Fritters

A fried batter with eggs, flour, butter, and boiling water, filled with jelly or fruit and dusted with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Queen Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Boil water in a saucepan, then add butter.

  2. Once boiling, add flour all at once and stir quickly until the mixture leaves the sides of the saucepan.

  3. Remove from heat and let cool.

  4. Add unbeaten eggs one at a time, beating until smooth after each addition.

Fry and fill

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture into fat heated to 355°F (180°C) that browns a cube of bread in 70 seconds.

  2. Cook until very light.

  3. Drain.

  4. Make an opening in the side and fill with jelly or fruit.

  5. Sprinkle with powdered sugar.

  6. Serve on a folded napkin.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour 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

Eggs
Add structure as they set, giving the fritters a light, hollow body.
Flour
Forms the starch and gluten framework that holds the puffed fritter together.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the dough.
Boiling water
Gelatinizes the flour when combined, creating a smooth, workable choux-style dough.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture before adding eggs. If the dough is still hot, the eggs can scramble or cook unevenly, and the batter will not emulsify smoothly. Eggs added to cooled dough blend evenly and help the fritters puff in hot fat.

“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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