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Spinach Fritters
Boil the spinach until tender; drain; press and mince fine; add half the quantity of grated stale bread, one grate of nutmeg and a small teaspoonful of sugar; add a gill of cream and as many eggs as will make a batter, beating the whites separately; pepper and salt to taste. Drop a little from the spoon into boiling lard; if it separates, add a little more crumbs of bread. When they rise to the surface of the fat they are done; drain and serve quickly.
A drop fritter with no fixed proportions: the spinach dictates everything, and the batter is corrected by test-frying. Two things decide whether it works — how dry you get the spinach, and how hot the fat is.
- Squeeze the spinach hard"Press" is the hinge of the recipe. Wring the cooked spinach in a towel until no more water comes out; wet spinach is what makes the test spoonful disintegrate in the fat. Roughly 2 lb raw spinach, or two 10-oz packages of frozen leaf spinach, cooks down to about a cup packed.
- A gill of creamHalf a cup. With well-drained spinach that is a generous amount of liquid — start with half and add the rest only if the mixture is stiff.
- Grated stale breadDry crumbs grated from a day-old loaf, not the fine sandy commercial kind and not fresh soft crumbs. "Half the quantity" means half the volume of the minced spinach, so about half a cup to a cup of spinach.
- As many eggs as will make a batterTwo eggs is usually right for this quantity, whites beaten separately and folded in last. A third egg only if the mixture will not hold a spoon shape.
- Boiling lardFat for deep frying, 365–375F. "Boiling" describes the appearance of hot fat, not an actual boil. Lard fries these well; any neutral high-smoke-point oil works the same way.
- The test spoonfulFollow it literally. Drop one spoonful in, and if it feathers apart, beat in more crumbs a tablespoon at a time before committing the rest.
- When they rise, they are doneThat signal is approximate — expect 2 to 3 minutes and a deep brown crust before lifting them out. Fry in small batches so the fat temperature does not crash.
- YieldAbout 18 to 20 walnut-sized fritters, enough for four as a side dish. They soften within minutes, so "serve quickly" is not decoration.
Spinach was among the green vegetables that Victorian and Edwardian cookbooks treated with some enthusiasm, and the standard treatment — boiled hard, drained, chopped to a purée, then enriched with cream, nutmeg and sugar — recurs in English and American household manuals of the period. The nutmeg-and-sugar pairing with spinach is old, going back to the sweet-savoury seasoning habits of earlier centuries, and it survived in spinach dishes long after it had left most other vegetables. Turning the purée into a fried fritter reflects the era's fondness for deep fat, and books of this sort often offered fritter versions of vegetables as a way of putting something plain on the table in company form. The test-drop instruction is characteristic of the genre too — with no standard bread, no standard egg size and no thermometer, the cook was expected to calibrate by trial rather than by measurement.