Boil 1 quart of water; add 1 teaspoonful of salt, 2 tablespoonfuls of butter; then stir in enough sifted flour until thick and smooth. When cold, stir in 5 beaten eggs, sugar and a little nutmeg to taste. Fry in deep hot lard to a golden brown. Serve with wine sauce.
This is a choux paste — the same cooked flour-and-egg batter used for cream puffs — dropped into fat instead of baked. The proportions given are unusual, and the quantity is large.
- The hinge: cook the paste, then cool itThe flour must be stirred into the boiling water and worked over the heat until it forms a smooth mass that pulls away from the pan. If eggs go in while the paste is hot they scramble, and the fritters will not puff.
- How much flourThe recipe says only "enough." For a quart of water, a standard choux paste takes roughly 4 cups (about 1 lb) of flour, added all at once and beaten hard. Judge by texture: a stiff paste that holds a spoon upright.
- The butter and egg ratio is leanModern choux uses considerably more butter and a good many more eggs per quart of water than this. Two tablespoons of butter and five eggs will give a dense, bready fritter rather than a hollow puffed one. Cooks wanting the light interior should add eggs one at a time until the paste falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon.
- Fat and temperatureLard was the standard frying fat and works well; any neutral fat will do. Hold it at 350-360F. Higher and the outsides brown before the centres set, which is the classic failure with these — a raw, wet core.
- Give them roomDrop by small spoonfuls, no more than a walnut each, and fry only a few at a time. They roughly triple in size and will turn themselves as they cook. Eight to ten minutes each is not too long.
- Wine saucePeriod wine sauces for fritters were generally a sweetened custard or a cooked syrup flavoured with sherry or Madeira, served warm. Any warm sabayon or hard sauce suits them; so does simple sugar and lemon.
- YieldA full quart of water makes a very large batch — on the order of five to six dozen small fritters. Halving or quartering is sensible, since choux fritters are only good in the first hour.
French fritters of this kind are beignets soufflés, sometimes called pets de nonne in France — choux paste fried rather than baked, so that the steam trapped inside blows the fritter hollow. The technique reached American cookbooks largely through the French professional tradition that shaped nineteenth-century hotel and restaurant cooking, and it appears in household manuals as a way of putting a fashionable French sweet within reach of a domestic kitchen.