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Delicious Apple Fritters
Pare and core good tart apples, not too mellow. Cut in round slices about half an inch thick. Dip each slice in sugar and ground cinnamon, mixed. Then take on the end of the forefinger and whirl around in the following batter till thickly covered with it. Then drop in hot drippings and fry a light brown. To one pint of milk add three lightly beaten eggs, a pinch of soda and a pinch of salt, and flour enough to make a batter about as stiff as ordinary light-cakes. Dust powdered sugar over the fritters before serving. Chopped apples stirred into this batter and fried by spoonfuls make a nice fritter, but not as handsome a dish as the first way of making them.
A straightforward batter fritter, but the original assumes you know how thick a griddle-cake batter runs and how hot rendered fat should be. Those two things decide whether the apple cooks through or the coating sogs.
- Fat and temperature"Hot drippings" means rendered beef or pork fat; aim for roughly 360-375F. Any neutral oil works; much cooler and the batter tends to soak up fat, much hotter and the outside browns before the apple slice softens.
- "As stiff as ordinary light-cakes"Light-cakes are griddle cakes, so aim for a batter that coats a spoon heavily but still pours. A pint of milk with three eggs will take roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of flour; add it gradually and stop when a dipped apple ring holds an even sheath.
- QuantityA pint of milk makes a great deal of batter, likely enough for four or five large apples. Halve it for a household of two or three.
- The pinch of sodaWith no acid in the batter, the soda does very little beyond a faint lift and a little browning. It is not a leavener here; do not increase it or the fritters take on a soapy edge.
- Choosing apples"Tart, not too mellow" means a firm cooking apple that holds its ring: Granny Smith, Braeburn, Northern Spy. A soft, ripe eating apple collapses in the fat and the slice tears when you spin it on your finger.
- Slice thicknessHalf an inch is at the upper limit for frying through. A shade under is safer, and an apple corer gives the neat centre hole the recipe is after.
- The finger trickWhirling the sugared slice on a forefinger is simply a way to coat it evenly without a fork breaking the ring. A skewer or chopstick through the core hole does the same job with less risk near hot fat.
- Draining and sugaringDrain on a rack rather than paper so the underside stays crisp, and dust with powdered sugar only at the moment of serving, otherwise it dissolves into the surface.
Frying sliced fruit in batter is old and widely distributed across Europe, and the "drippings" called for here point to a kitchen where beef or pork fat was saved in a crock by the stove as a matter of course, long before bottled cooking oil was ordinary. The distinction the author draws at the end, between neat rings and spoonfuls of chopped apple, is a small window on what mattered in a period cook's mind: only one of them makes what the author calls a handsome dish.