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Dessert

Apple Fritters

Apple fritters are fried batter with chopped apples, served dusted with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Apple Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Make a batter with milk, eggs, and enough flour to achieve a smooth consistency.

  2. Peel and core the apples, then chop them into small pieces.

  3. Mix the chopped apples into the batter.

  4. Add cream of tartar and baking soda, and mix well.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat lard in a frying pan and drop spoonfuls of the batter into the hot lard.

  2. Fry until golden brown and serve dusted with powdered 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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Milk + appletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure to the fritters as they set.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the batter together while it fries.
Apples
Add moisture and sweetness, and stay tender inside the fried batter.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter so it reacts with baking soda to help the fritters rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that lightens the fritters.

The step that matters

Frying the batter in hot lard. If the lard is not hot enough, the batter absorbs fat and turns greasy instead of crisping and browning quickly. Frying spoonfuls at a steady heat seals the outside and lets the inside cook through.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, flour, cream, 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.

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