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Bell Fritters
Boil one pint of water in a kettle, add to it one tablespoonful of fresh butter, mix one pint of flour with cold water, making into a paste; then pour boiling water over this, little at a time, keeping the paste smooth. Return it to the kettle and stir carefully to prevent lumping. Have well beaten, six eggs, then add to them a spoonful of the mixture at a time until it is all well. mixed. Beat rapidly, in order that the eggs may not cook in lumps. When beaten very light, drop the fritters in the shape of an egg into boiling hot lard. To be eaten with molasses or maple syrup.
This is choux paste by another name — flour scalded with boiling water, then loaded with egg and deep-fried. The method as printed is roundabout; the proportions are sound.
- The hinge: cool the paste before the eggsThe hinge: temper the eggs -- The instruction to add the paste to the eggs a spoonful at a time exists to keep the eggs from scrambling; the gradual addition plus hard beating is what tempers them. Letting the paste cool to warm first makes this easier and safer — or beat the eggs into the paste one at a time, which is the modern order and gives much the same result.
- "Kettle"A saucepan or pot on the stove, not a tea kettle. The same vessel is used for the boiling water and for cooking the paste.
- MeasuresA pint of water is 2 cups. A pint of flour is a volume measure, roughly 2 cups, about 8-9 oz. A tablespoon of butter is very little fat for that much flour — modern choux uses many times as much — so expect a lean, chewy fritter rather than a rich one.
- The cold-water paste stepSlaking the flour with cold water first, then adding boiling water gradually, is an older way of avoiding lumps. Nothing is lost by doing it the usual way: bring the water and butter to a boil, dump in the flour at once, and beat over the heat until the mass pulls from the pan.
- Frying fat and temperatureLard fries these beautifully; any neutral fat at 360-375F works. Below that they soak; above, the outsides set before the interior steam has puffed them. Fry in small batches — they roughly double.
- Shaping"In the shape of an egg" means two spoons, one to scoop and one to push the paste off into the fat. They will crack and turn themselves as they cook, which is a sign the fat is at the right heat.
- DonenessDeep golden all over and light in the hand, four to six minutes. A pale fritter is a raw fritter inside; cut one open before committing the batch.
- YieldNot given. This quantity makes about two dozen egg-sized fritters — eight servings with syrup. They must be eaten hot; they collapse and toughen within the hour.
Bell fritters turn up repeatedly in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks, especially Southern ones, generally with this same scalded-flour-and-many-eggs formula — which is to say they are pâte à choux, fried instead of baked, and the name is often said to be an anglicisation of beignet, though that derivation is traditional rather than documented. The technique appears to have reached American kitchens through French cookery, and it was absorbed into the plain repertoire of griddle cakes and fried breakfast breads, served, like them, with molasses or maple syrup rather than sugar and cream. Their appearance here under Vegetables is curious; nothing about them belongs to that chapter.