Beat 1 cup of sugar with ½ cup of butter to a cream; add 2 beaten eggs, a pinch of salt, ½ cup of milk and the grated peel of ½ lemon. Add enough sifted flour with 1 teaspoonful of baking-powder to make a soft biscuit dough. Put on a well-floured baking-board. Roll out a half inch thick. Cut into triangles and drop in a kettle of hot rendered butter; fry until a golden brown. Then mix some powdered sugar with a little milk and flavor with vanilla. Spread on the top.
A fried triangular cake in the Purim tradition, glazed rather than filled. The original gives no flour quantity and no frying temperature, so both need judgment.
- Flour quantity"Enough sifted flour... to make a soft biscuit dough" works out to roughly 2½ to 3 cups with these proportions, but add it gradually. The dough should just hold together and stay tacky; a stiff dough fries dense and dry.
- Rendered butterThis means clarified butter, with the milk solids removed, because whole butter scorches and burns well below frying temperature. Clarified butter or ghee will hold up; a neutral oil is the practical substitute if you would rather not use a quart of it.
- "A kettle"Here a kettle is simply a deep pot, not a tea kettle. Use a heavy pan with at least three inches of headroom above the fat.
- Frying temperatureHold the fat at 360-370F. Below that the thick dough soaks; above it the outside browns before the centre sets.
- Half an inch is thickThese are closer to a soft doughnut than a cookie, and they puff. Fry two to three minutes per side and break one open to confirm the middle is cooked before doing the rest.
- The glazePowdered sugar with a little milk and vanilla makes a thin water-icing. Add the milk a teaspoon at a time; it takes very little, and it should be spread while the cakes are barely warm so it sets rather than runs off.
- YieldAbout 20 to 24 triangles from a half-inch sheet, depending on how large you cut them. Best the day they are fried.
Purim, the early-spring festival marking the deliverance recounted in the Book of Esther, is traditionally kept with gifts of food and a plate of sweet cakes, and the triangular shape is generally traced to the three-cornered hat of Haman, the villain of the story, or to his ears. The best-known version today is the baked, filled hamantasch of Central and Eastern Europe, usually with poppy seed or prune; fried Purim pastries are also a long-standing habit, and Italian, Sephardi and North African communities all keep versions of sweet fried dough for the holiday. The recipe itself is headed only "Jewish" and names no holiday, so the Purim framing here is inference. This one is made with butter and milk, which places it firmly among the dairy foods served apart from any meat meal. Its appearance in a book that sets out to give a dish from a different nation for every day of the year says something about how American compilers of the period treated Jewish cooking: as one more national cuisine to be sampled, filed here between an English meat loaf and a Swiss pie.