Skip to main content
Main

Corn Fritters

Corn fritters are fried corn batter with milk, flour, baking soda, cream of tartar, butter, eggs, salt, pepper, and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Corn Fritters

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Corn Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine grated corn, milk, flour, baking soda, cream of tartar, melted butter, eggs, salt, and pepper. Mix until well combined.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat lard in a frying pan over high heat.

  2. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture into the hot lard and fry until golden brown on both sides.

  3. Remove and drain on paper towels 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.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  4. Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure so the fritters hold together when fried.
Flour
Provides the starch that sets the batter and gives the fritters body.
Baking soda
Reacts with the cream of tartar to produce gas that lightens the batter.
Cream of tartar
Acid that reacts with baking soda, helping the fritters rise and stay tender.
Grated corn
Supplies the main flavor and moisture, and its sugars help the surface brown.
Milk
Adds moisture and liquid so the flour hydrates into a spoonable batter.

The step that matters

Frying the spoonfuls in hot lard. If the lard is not hot enough, the batter absorbs oil and turns greasy instead of forming a crisp golden crust. Good heat sets the outside quickly while the inside cooks through.

“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.

More corn fritters recipes

Green 46Sweet 7 See all 396 →

You might also like

Cream of Corn SoupCream of Corn Soup50 recipesGreen Corn SoupGreen Corn Soup46 recipesCornmeal GruelCornmeal Gruel41 recipesCornmeal PuddingCornmeal Pudding32 recipes