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Batter for Fritters
1 cup bread flour. 1 tablespoon sugar. 1/4 teaspoon salt. 2/3 cup milk. ½ teaspoon melted Cottolene.
White one egg beaten stiff.
PROCESS: Mix flour, sugar and salt. Add milk slowly, stirring constantly until batter is smooth; add Cottolene and white of egg. Batter must be smooth as cream.
A plain coating batter, leavened only by the beaten egg white, meant for dipping fruit or vegetables before deep frying. It comes together in five minutes, but the two things that decide whether it works are the consistency and the temperature of the fat.
- CottoleneA brand of shortening made from cottonseed oil and beef suet, sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company and no longer produced. Use 1½ teaspoons of any neutral melted fat: vegetable shortening, mild oil, or clarified butter.
- Bread flour is deliberateThe higher protein gives a coating that clings and crisps rather than sliding off in the fat. All-purpose works but produces a softer, more fragile crust; do not substitute cake flour.
- Fold, do not stir, the egg whiteThe recipe says "add" but the white is the only lift in the batter. Fold it in with a spatula in two additions and use the batter within about fifteen minutes, before the foam collapses.
- "Smooth as cream"That is the real instruction. The batter should coat a spoon and run off in a thick ribbon. If it is thicker than heavy cream, thin with milk a teaspoon at a time; too thick and the interior stays raw while the outside browns.
- Frying temperatureThe book assumes you know it; modern practice is 365-375F. Below that the batter drinks fat, above it the coating colors before the fruit inside heats through. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. One cup of flour with 2/3 cup milk makes roughly a cup and a half of thin coating batter; how many fritters that yields depends entirely on what you dip and how thickly it clings.
- What to dip in itApple rings, banana halves, canned pineapple, cooked corn kernels, oysters, or cold cooked cauliflower. Pat wet items dry first or the batter will not adhere.
52 Sunday Dinners was compiled by Elizabeth O. Hiller and published by the N. K. Fairbank Company, which made Cottolene — which is why a shortening brand name appears in the ingredient list of a fritter batter that hardly needs fat at all. Cottolene was one of the earliest industrial cottonseed-oil shortenings marketed to American cooks as a cheaper, cleaner substitute for lard, and cookbooks like this one were the advertising: a whole year of menus in which the product turns up repeatedly. The batter itself is much older than the branding. A flour-and-milk coating lightened with beaten egg white is close to the standard nineteenth-century frying batters given by Eliza Acton and Mrs. Beeton.