Home › Puddings › Apple Fritters
Apple Fritters
1 1/2 cupfuls flour 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 egg 1 tablespoonful melted Crisco 3/4 cupful milk 3 apples cut in quarter inch slices 3 tablespoonfuls sugar 1 lemon Peel, core and slice apples, then sprinkle 2 tablespoonfuls sugar and strained juice of the lemon over them. Sift flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt into bowl, add milk to well beaten egg and stir liquid gradually into dry materials, beating thoroughly, then add Crisco. Cover apple slices with batter and drop them into plenty of Crisco heated so that small breadcrumb browns in sixty seconds. Fry for four or five minutes. Drain and sprinkle with powdered sugar. Any other fruit may be substituted for apples or a combination of fruits makes a delicious fritter.
Sufficient for twelve fritters.
A straightforward drop-batter fritter from a book written to sell shortening. Two details in the original need reading twice: the sugar is split between the fruit and the batter, and the frying temperature is given as a breadcrumb test.
- The sugar splitsThree tablespoons of sugar are listed; two go over the sliced apples with the lemon juice, and the remaining one is sifted into the dry ingredients. The recipe never says so directly.
- Frying temperature"A small breadcrumb browns in sixty seconds" indicates moderate frying heat, somewhere around 350-365F. Below that the batter absorbs fat and goes heavy; much above it and the coating colours before the apple softens.
- CriscoCrisco is still sold, but any neutral fat with a high smoke point works for frying, and melted butter or oil does the job of the tablespoon in the batter. The brand name appears because the book was published to promote it.
- ApplesQuarter-inch rings from a firm, tart apple hold their shape best. Very soft dessert apples collapse into the batter during four or five minutes in hot fat.
- Coating the slicesThe lemon juice and sugar draw moisture out of the apples, so blot the slices before dipping or the batter will slide off. Lift each slice out with a fork and let the excess run back into the bowl.
- Batter consistencyWith 1 1/2 cups flour to 3/4 cup milk and one egg, this is a thick coating batter, stiffer than a pancake batter. Thin it a spoonful at a time only if it is claggy rather than pourable.
- Frying in batches"Plenty of Crisco" means enough fat for the fritters to float and swim, not a shallow pan. Fry four or five at a time so the fat temperature does not crash, and drain on a rack rather than flat on paper, which steams the underside.
- YieldTwelve fritters, which serves four as a pudding. They do not hold; sugar them and serve at once.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble as advertising for Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company introduced in 1911. That explains why the fat is named as a branded product in both the batter and the frying pot, and why the book is so confident about deep-frying: Crisco's selling point against lard and butter was a high smoke point and a lack of flavour of its own, which suited exactly this kind of fruit fritter. Battered and fried fruit is much older than the book, of course — apple fritters appear in English cookery writing for centuries before this, usually leavened with ale or yeast rather than baking powder. What marks this version as early twentieth-century American is the chemical leavening, the cup measures, and the assumption that a household could keep a can of standardised shortening on the shelf.