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Fritters (To make a nice batter Peel)
to make a nice batter. Peel and cut apples in rather thin slices, drop in the batter, see that they are well covered, and then fry in boiling fat. Sprinkle thickly with powdered sugar.
A plain apple fritter of the sort that turned up at breakfast and supper alike. The written portion assumes you already have a batter standing ready, so the work is in the frying.
- The batterThe batter instructions are missing from this page, which opens mid-sentence. A workable fritter batter along the lines of those in period books: about 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, a pinch of salt, 1 egg and roughly 2/3 cup milk, beaten smooth to the thickness of heavy cream. It should coat a slice and cling without running off.
- "Boiling fat"Fat does not boil; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble hard around whatever is dropped in. Use 350-365F. Below that the slices drink oil, above 375F the batter colours before the apple softens.
- Slice thicknessThe recipe does not say how thin; something around 1/4 inch works. Coring first and cutting crosswise into rings gives slices that cook evenly; thicker slices leave raw crunchy fruit inside a browned shell.
- Choice of appleA firm tart variety holds its shape best -- Granny Smith, Braeburn, Northern Spy. Soft eating apples collapse into sauce inside the coating.
- Frying in batchesFour or five slices at a time in a deep pan. Crowding drops the fat temperature sharply and the batter goes greasy rather than crisp. Two to three minutes, turning once, until deep gold.
- Draining and sugaringLift onto paper or a rack, not onto a plate where steam softens the underside. Sugar them while still hot so the powdered sugar clings; if you sugar cold fritters it simply falls off.
- YieldThree medium apples give roughly 18 to 20 rings, enough for four to six people. Fritters do not keep well -- they go limp within half an hour, and reheating recovers little of the crispness.
Fritters were among the most economical of nineteenth-century sweets: a little flour, an egg, whatever fruit was cheapest, and a pan of fat that was already hot from something else. Apple versions dominate American household books because apples stored through the winter in cellars and barrels when nothing else did, and a slightly wrinkled specimen from February is improved rather than exposed by being sliced, battered and fried. The technique itself is old and pan-European, the French beignet and the English fritter generally traced to the same medieval habit of frying batter-coated foods in deep fat; by 1900 American cookbooks were applying it indiscriminately to corn, oysters, clams, bananas and, most often, apples. The dusting of powdered sugar was the standard finish, though contemporaries also served them with maple syrup or a hard sauce.