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Bread Fritters

Bread fritters are fried bread squares coated in a milk, egg, and flour batter, served hot with jam and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Bread Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix milk, egg, and flour in a bowl to make a batter.

Assemble and fry

  1. Cut the bread into thin squares or triangles.

  2. Spread jam on half of the bread pieces and top with the remaining pieces.

  3. Dip the sandwich pieces into the batter.

  4. Fry the battered pieces in boiling lard until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve hot, sprinkled with white 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. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the batter, hydrating the flour into a coating.
Egg
Binds the batter and helps it set and brown as it fries.
Flour
Thickens the batter so it clings to the bread and crisps when fried.
Bread
Forms the soft interior that is enclosed by the batter and fried crisp.
Jam
Adds sweetness and fruity flavor filling between the bread layers.

The step that matters

Frying the battered pieces in boiling lard. The fat must be hot enough to set the batter quickly and turn it golden. If the lard is too cool, the batter absorbs more fat and becomes greasy and soggy before it crisps.

“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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