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Anchovy Fritters
Pound yolks 2 hard-cooked eggs with 1/2 dozen bottled anchovies, 1 teaspoon capers 4 tablespoons Crisco and 4 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese. Rub all through fine wire sieve and add yolk 1 raw egg and 1 tablespoon breadcrumbs. Season with pepper and with salt if it is needed.
Form paste into small balls, roll first in breadcrumbs, then in egg and again in crumbs, and drop into hot Crisco. Serve on napkin with grated Parmesan cheese. The recipe as here given may be doubled, and "redoubled" as many times as it is thought the demand for fritters will warrant.
A savoury of pounded anchovy and egg yolk, fried and served as a hot appetiser. The whole thing hinges on the paste being stiff and dry enough to hold a ball; if it slumps, the crumbs will not stay on and the fritters will burst in the fat.
- CriscoThis book was published to sell Crisco, so shortening appears where an earlier cook would have used butter or lard. In the paste, use 4 tablespoons of softened butter or shortening; for frying, any neutral oil with a high smoke point works.
- Frying temperatureBring the fat to 350-375F and fry in small batches. The balls are already cooked through apart from the raw yolk binder, so they need only two to three minutes to set the crust and heat the centre.
- Bottled anchoviesHalf a dozen bottled anchovies means six anchovies, not six tins; period bottled anchovies were often whole cured fish, each yielding two fillets, so six modern fillets may be on the light side. Saltiness varies a great deal between products, so taste the paste before adding any salt at all, which is presumably why the recipe leaves the salt conditional.
- The sieveRubbing through a fine wire sieve is what makes the paste smooth enough to bind. A food processor does the same work in seconds, but scrape down and pulse until no fibres of anchovy remain.
- Chill the pasteThe original does not say so, but 30 minutes in the refrigerator before shaping makes the balls far easier to handle and keeps them from spreading in the fat.
- BreadingCrumbs, then beaten egg, then crumbs again. Use the white left over from the raw egg plus a little water for the dip, and dry fine crumbs rather than coarse fresh ones, which soak up oil.
- YieldAs written this makes perhaps a dozen or so small fritters, enough for a few people as a nibble before dinner. It scales, as the last line suggests.
- Serving on a napkinA folded cloth or paper napkin on the serving dish was a common period presentation for fried food, and blotted some of the fat. A wire rack over paper does more to keep the crust crisp.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbook published by manufacturers rather than authors, written to demonstrate a single product across every course of the day; here that product is Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, and the recipes are built to prove it could replace both butter and lard. The fritter itself is older than the book: pounded anchovy pastes seasoned with capers and cheese appear in English and Anglo-Italian cookery of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often served as a savoury at the end of dinner or as a hot bite with drinks beforehand. The closing note about doubling and "redoubling" suggests these small fried savouries were expected to disappear faster than the cook could make them.