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Dessert

Spanish Puff Fritters

A puffed fried dough made with water, butter, sugar, flour, eggs, vanilla, and fried in hot lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Spanish Puff Fritters

Oven, in the book's wordsA slack oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Boil the water, sugar, and butter in a deep saucepan.

  2. Add the flour all at once and stir until you have a firm, well-cooked paste.

  3. Remove from heat.

Add the eggs

  1. Work in the eggs one at a time, beating well against the side of the saucepan.

  2. Add the vanilla with the last egg.

Fry and serve

  1. Drop pieces the size of guinea eggs into hot lard and fry slowly, cooking only four or five at a time.

  2. Serve with powdered sugar sifted over or a rich pudding sauce.

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. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + vanillatop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,241 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + vanillatop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,050 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Flour
Forms the firm paste that gives the fritters their structure as they cook.
Eggs
Add moisture and set during frying, helping the fritters puff and turn light.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the boiled paste, contributing tenderness and flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and contributes to browning of the outside during frying.

The step that matters

Frying slowly in batches. Frying in small batches keeps the lard hot enough to cook the fritters through and puff them, while slow frying avoids burning the outside before the centre sets. Crowding the pan drops the lard temperature and makes the fritters greasy and dense.

Swap the vanilla

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillathe original
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Lemonfits less well

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