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Carrot Fritters
Have nice, young, tender carrots, clean and scrape them carefully, and cut each one in two lengthwise. Put to boil in salted water. Take up, drain and cool, and make a frying batter as follow: Beat up 1 egg, sift in 1 cup flour, 3/4 cup milk, pinch of salt, and 1 tablespoon melted Crisco. Mix till smooth and glossy. Allow to stand in cool place for 1 hour, then add 1 teaspoon baking powder. Put in few pieces of carrot at a time. Drop into hot Crisco and fry for few minutes. Serve hot.
A straightforward fritter batter with parboiled carrots, from one of the Crisco-sponsored cookbooks of the 1910s. The main thing the original leaves vague is how done the carrots should be before they meet the batter.
- Parboil, do not cook throughThe carrots go into hot fat afterwards, so boil the halves only until a knife meets slight resistance — roughly 8 to 12 minutes for young carrots, depending on thickness. Fully soft carrots collapse inside the crust.
- Dry them completelyThe instruction to drain and cool matters more than it looks. Batter slides off damp carrots; pat them dry with a towel and let them sit uncovered for a few minutes before dipping.
- CriscoCrisco in this period was hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, and it is named throughout because books of this kind were produced as promotional literature for the manufacturer. Any neutral frying fat works, and a tablespoon of melted butter or oil is fine in the batter.
- The baking powder goes in lastThe hour's rest relaxes the gluten so the batter clings smoothly; adding the baking powder only at the end means the gas is still in the batter when it hits the fat. Do not stir it in early and then wait.
- Fat temperature"Hot Crisco" here means about 365–375F. Below that the fritters absorb fat and turn heavy; much above it the crust colours before the carrot heats through. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- Timing"Few minutes" is two to three minutes, turning once, until deep gold. The carrot is already cooked, so you are only setting the batter.
- YieldThe batter — 1 egg, 1 cup flour, 3/4 cup milk — will coat roughly a pound of carrots; the recipe gives no quantity or serving count, but that is about enough for four as a vegetable side.
- Draining and servingLift onto a rack rather than paper if you are frying in batches, and salt while still glistening. They soften quickly, so serve them straight from the pan as the recipe says.
Battered and fried vegetables were standard American household cooking well before this book, and carrot fritters appear in nineteenth-century manuals as a way of stretching a cheap root into something that eats like a treat. What dates this particular version is the branded fat: it comes from the era when Procter & Gamble commissioned entire cookbooks around Crisco, introduced in 1911, to persuade cooks that a shelf-stable vegetable shortening could replace lard and butter in frying and baking alike.