Make a rich puff paste; roll out thin and cut into squares; then fill with fruit jam; turn over and pinch in the edges. Drop in a kettle of deep hot lard and fry until a delicate brown. Sprinkle with pulverized sugar and serve hot.
A fried jam turnover under a slightly grand name. The recipe assumes you already know how to make puff paste and how to run a kettle of deep fat, so most of the work of modernising is filling in the numbers it leaves out.
- The hinge: seal the edges properlyJam that escapes into hot fat will burn, foam and spoil the whole kettle. Brush the border with water or egg white, press hard, then crimp with a fork, and leave a good half-inch margin unfilled — no more than a rounded teaspoon of jam per square.
- "Pulverized sugar"A finely ground sugar, the period equivalent of today's powdered or confectioners' sugar, though grocers' grades varied and the cornstarch blended into modern confectioners' sugar is a later addition. Cooks also pounded and sifted loaf sugar at home. Granulated sugar will not cling to the pastry the same way.
- Kettle of deep hot lardA "kettle" here is a deep, heavy pot, not a tea kettle. Fill it no more than a third and hold the fat at 365–375F; below that the puff paste soaks up grease before it can rise, above it the outside colours before the layers set. Lard is authentic and fries well, but any neutral high-smoke-point fat works.
- Rolling thinPuff paste for frying should be rolled thinner than you would for a baked tart — about 1/8 inch. It expands violently in hot fat, and thick pastry stays raw in the middle while the surface browns.
- Size and yieldSquares of about 3 inches give a turnover that cooks through in roughly 3 to 4 minutes, turning once. A batch from a pound of puff paste makes something like 16 to 18 — enough for six to eight people.
- Chill before fryingThe recipe does not say so, but cold pastry is the difference between a puff and a leaden pillow. Rest the filled turnovers in the refrigerator for 20 minutes so the butter is firm when it hits the fat.
- ServingSugar them the moment they come out of the fat and while still damp with heat, or it will not stick. They are worth eating within the hour; reheated, fried puff paste turns tough.
Fried jam pastries of this kind belong to a long European family — the Italian tortelli dolci and the various fair-ground fritters — and the English claim here rests on the puff paste and the jam rather than on anything peculiarly national. Jam turnovers, baked, were a staple of English nursery and tea-table cookery through the nineteenth century. Books like this one, arranged as a dish a day drawn from a different country, were a fashion of the early twentieth century: they promised the American housekeeper variety without much research, and the national labels are often loose. Lard was still the ordinary frying fat in domestic kitchens at the time, and "pulverized sugar" was a distinct grocery item from granulated, sold ready-ground for exactly this kind of finishing.