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Apricot Fritters
Mix a pound of sifted flour in a bowl with a pint of sweet milk (or water will do); mix until it becomes perfectly smooth, and stir in two ounces of melted butter, and the whites of three eggs, beaten to a stiff froth. Dip twelve or fourteen apricots in this batter, previously cut in halves and sprinkled with white sugar; fry in hot lard to a light brown; drain them upon a cloth; sift white sugar over them and serve hot. Delicious.
A straightforward fruit fritter, though the batter as written is thicker and larger in volume than most cooks will want. Read the ratios before you start.
- Batter quantityA pound of flour (about 4 cups sifted) with a pint of milk makes a very stiff paste and far more batter than twelve or fourteen apricots, halved, need. Half the recipe is generous, and thin with a little extra milk until it coats a spoon thickly rather than clinging in a lump.
- Whites onlyOnly the three whites go in, beaten stiff and folded through at the end. That is what gives the coating its lift; do the folding last and fry promptly, before the foam collapses.
- Fat and temperatureLard is still the best frying fat for this and behaves well at 360-375F. Any neutral oil works. Below 350F the batter absorbs fat and goes heavy; above 390F the outside colours before the fruit heats through.
- Preparing the fruitHalve and stone the apricots and pat them dry, then sugar them. Wet fruit sheds batter in the fat. Fresh apricots should be ripe but firm; tinned halves need thorough draining and blotting.
- Frying in batchesFour or five halves at a time, cut side up as they go in so the hollow fills with batter rather than trapping oil. Two to three minutes total, turning once.
- Draining"Drain upon a cloth" means a folded towel or paper; a wire rack over a tray works better and keeps the underside from steaming soft.
- YieldTwelve to fourteen apricots, cut in halves, give twenty-four to twenty-eight pieces, enough for six or more as a dessert course. Sift the final sugar on just before they go to the table, not while they are still glossy with fat.
Fruit fritters of this kind run through nineteenth-century English and American household books, where a single batter recipe is often given and then applied in turn to apples, peaches, apricots, bananas and orange sections. The technique is older than any of those books: batter-dipped fried fruit appears in medieval European cookery, and the word fritter comes through Middle English from Old French friture, frying. Apricots were grown commercially in quantity in California from the later nineteenth century. The closing "Delicious" is the kind of endorsement often found in cookbooks assembled from contributors' recipes.