Skip to main content
Dessert

Beignets De Pommes De Terre

A French potato fritter made by boiling, mashing, mixing with cream, brandy, butter, egg, then frying and dusting with sugar.

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

Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Beignets De Pommes De Terre

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Boil the potatoes until tender, then peel and mash them.

  2. In a bowl, combine the mashed potatoes with salt, cream, brandy, and butter.

  3. Add the egg and mix until the paste is thick enough to form balls.

  4. Let the mixture cool, then shape it into small balls.

  5. Dust the balls with flour.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the balls in butter until golden brown.

  2. Sift sugar over the beignets before serving.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Potatoes
Provide starch and bulk that give the dough its soft, tender body.
Egg
Binds the mashed potato so the paste holds together when shaped.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the outside brown during frying.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, keeping the mashed potato paste soft.
Brandy
Adds aroma and flavor to the dough.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before shaping. A hot, loose paste is hard to shape and can stay sticky. Cooling lets the starches firm up slightly so the balls hold their form and fry without falling apart.

Swap the potato

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

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

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

Deep-Fried Potato BallsDeep-Fried Potato Balls119 recipesOrange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesBrandy PeachesBrandy Peaches68 recipesBrandy CreamBrandy Cream21 recipes