Soak ½ loaf of bread in milk; add 1 cup of sugar, ½ cup of raisins, ½ cup of pounded nuts, the grated peel of a lemon and a pinch of cinnamon. Then mix with the yolks of 4 eggs and the whites beaten stiff and fry by the tablespoonful in hot fat until brown. Serve hot with wine sauce.
September 3 — No. 3
Jewish
A soaked-bread fritter batter, close to what most cooks would recognise as chremslach. The original assumes you know how much bread and how hot the fat, so both need pinning down.
- Half a loaf, in practiceThe recipe gives no weight; a loaf of the period might run anywhere from about a pound upwards, so read half a loaf as somewhere in the region of 8-12 oz of bread, or roughly five to eight cups of torn crumb from a plain white sandwich or challah loaf. Soak in milk only until saturated, then squeeze hard; a wet batter will not hold a spoon shape in fat.
- Frying temperature"Hot fat" for a dropped batter is usually taken as 360-375F. Below that the fritters drink oil, above it the sugar in the batter scorches before the centre sets. Fry until brown on each side — two or three minutes a side for a tablespoon of batter — and drain on paper.
- Pounded nutsAlmonds or walnuts, ground in a mortar to a coarse meal rather than a smooth butter. A few pulses in a food processor gets there; run it too long and the oil releases and the batter turns heavy.
- Folding the whitesThe stiff whites are the only lift in this batter. Fold them in last, in two additions, and fry immediately; the batter loses its lift if left standing.
- Wine sauceNot specified here. A common version is egg yolks, sugar and sweet wine whisked over barely simmering water until it thickens to a pourable custard — essentially a zabaglione. Do not let it approach a boil or the yolks curdle.
- A cup of sugar is a lotWith raisins and a sweet sauce as well, most modern palates will want to drop the sugar to half a cup. The batter still browns properly at that level.
- Kosher noteAs written this is a dairy dish — bread and milk — so it belongs to the everyday repertoire, not to Passover, and the frying fat must not be schmaltz or any meat fat. Passover chremslach are made with matzo or matzo meal in place of the bread.
- YieldDepends heavily on how much milk is squeezed from the bread; expect at least two dozen tablespoon-sized fritters and possibly a good many more, enough for six to eight as a dessert or sweet supper dish.
Chremslach (the spelling here, chrimsel, is one of many transliterations from the Yiddish) are fried sweet fritters long associated with Ashkenazi Jewish cooking, and most familiar as a Passover dish made from matzo meal, eggs, nuts and dried fruit. This version substitutes ordinary bread and milk, which puts it outside Passover use entirely and marks it as a year-round dessert — the sort of adaptation that happened readily once immigrant cooking entered general American cookbooks. Its appearance in a book organised as a calendar of national dishes says a good deal about the period: publishers of the early twentieth century were assembling round-the-world collections in which each culture was reduced to a single representative plate, with the recipes filtered through American ingredients and American kitchens. The wine sauce served over it is the standard sweet egg-and-wine sauce found across Central European baking, related to Italian zabaglione and German Weinschaum.