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Pineapple Fritters
Peel the pineapple without any waste and slice; canned pineapple is just as nice for the purpose; fry them in a batter made as for orange fritters, or a very nice way of preparing this dish is to first steep the fruit in a glass of wine and then dip in the batter and fry a pretty brovn. sugar over the top and serve. Very nice for luncheon or tea. Sprinkle CHAPTER XV.
A simple fruit fritter that leans entirely on dry fruit and hot fat. The recipe assumes you already have a fritter batter to hand, since it cross-references the orange fritters elsewhere in the book.
- The batterNo batter is given here. A standard fritter batter of the period is roughly 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, a pinch of salt, 1 egg and about 1/2 cup milk, beaten smooth and no thicker than heavy cream. Modern cooks often substitute a beer or soda-water batter for a crisper coating.
- Dry the fruit, or nothing sticksThis is the hinge. Pineapple, and especially canned pineapple in syrup, carries a great deal of surface moisture; blot the slices thoroughly on a towel before dipping or the batter will slide off and the fat will spit.
- Cut and coreFresh pineapple slices should be about 1/2 inch thick with the fibrous core punched out. Half-rings are easier to turn than whole rings.
- "A glass of wine"No quantity is fixed; period cookbooks generally reckon a wineglassful at about 2 fl oz. A sweet wine, sherry or Madeira suits the fruit; steep 20 to 30 minutes, then drain and dry the slices well.
- Frying temperatureFat at 360-375F. Cooler than that and the batter absorbs grease before it sets; much hotter and the coating colours before the interior cooks. Two to three minutes a side gives the "pretty brown" called for.
- FinishingThe instruction is to sprinkle sugar over the top. Do it while the fritters are still hot so it clings; confectioners' sugar dissolves less and looks cleaner than granulated.
- Yield and servingOne medium pineapple yields about 8 to 10 slices, enough for four. Fry in small batches and hold on a rack rather than paper so the undersides stay crisp; serve immediately.
Fritters occupied an unusually large place in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American cookbooks, partly because deep frying was one of the few showy techniques that worked on a coal range without special equipment, and partly because a fritter could carry almost anything: corn, oysters, apples, bananas, leftover rice. Pineapple entered that repertoire chiefly through the can. Commercial canning of Hawaiian pineapple scaled up over the decade or so after 1901, and books of this era routinely note, as this one does, that the canned fruit is "just as nice" -- a small marker of how quickly tinned tropical fruit became ordinary in inland kitchens that would never have seen a fresh pineapple. The suggestion to steep the slices in wine first is often traced to an older European tradition of macerating fruit before frying, and the recommendation for "luncheon or tea" places the dish in the lighter, less formal meals where a sweet fried course was acceptable without being called dessert.