Peel and slice large apples; sprinkle with sugar and lemon-juice and make a rich egg batter. Sweeten to taste and flavor with 2 tablespoonfuls of orange-flower water. Lay the sliced apples in the batter and fry in deep hot lard to a golden brown. Serve with wine sauce.
April 20 — No. 20
French
The recipe assumes you already know how to build a fritter batter, so the quantities are left to you. What follows fills in the numbers and the two or three details that decide whether the fritters come out crisp or greasy.
- The batter, in numbersA workable modern reconstruction of a "rich egg batter" is roughly 1 cup flour, 2 eggs, about 2/3 cup milk, a spoonful of melted butter, a pinch of salt and a tablespoon of sugar; the proportions are a guess, not the book's. It should coat a slice thickly enough that the apple does not show through.
- Frying temperatureDeep fat at 365-375F. Below that the batter drinks fat before it sets; much above it and the crust colours before the apple softens. Lard is what the book means, and it fries beautifully, but any neutral fat with a high smoke point works.
- Slice thicknessCut cored apples into rings about 1/4 to 1/3 inch thick. Thicker slices leave the fruit raw at the centre in the two to three minutes the batter needs.
- Sugar and lemon firstThe sugaring and lemon juice is a short maceration, fifteen to twenty minutes at most. Longer and the slices weep liquid that thins the batter and makes it slide off. Blot the rings dry before dipping.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, usually in the Middle Eastern or baking aisle, and much stronger than most modern palates expect. Two tablespoons in a single batch of batter will read as perfumed; start with one or two teaspoons and taste.
- Wine sauceThe intended accompaniment is a warm sweet sauce: sugar, butter and a wine such as sherry or madeira, thickened lightly, sometimes with an egg yolk. A hard sauce or simply sifted sugar with a squeeze of lemon serves the same purpose.
- Apples to useChoose a firm cooking apple that holds its shape and is not too sweet, since sugar arrives from three directions. Yield is about four servings from three large apples.
- Serve at onceFritters lose their crispness within minutes. Drain on a rack rather than paper, keep them in a single layer, and send them out as they come from the fat.
Fruit fried in batter is old and widespread, but the French claim in a book like this rests on the beignet aux pommes, a standard entry in nineteenth-century French dessert repertoire and a fixture of Carnival and fairground cooking. The tell here is the orange-flower water: distilled from bitter orange blossom, it was the ordinary sweet flavouring of French pastry long before vanilla extract became cheap and universal, though it was also a common flavouring in English and American cookery generally. Volumes of the "a dish a day from every nation" type were popular in the early twentieth century, when middle-class American cooks were being encouraged to think of foreign dishes as accessible variety rather than novelty; the wine sauce, poured over hot fried fruit, belongs to the same fondness for a rich sauce on almost every dessert.