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Cheese Aigrettes
Bring 2 tablespoons Crisco and 1/2 cup water to boiling point, then add 1/2 cup flour and stir until mixture leaves sides of pan. Cool, but do not allow to become cold, then add 2 eggs, 1 by 1, 4 tablespoons grated cheese, salt, pepper, and paprika to taste and beat well. Allow to stand in cool place 30 minutes. Drop by teaspoons into hot Crisco and fry a golden brown. Drain and sprinkle with grated cheese. Serve hot. The Crisco should not be too hot or the cheese will burn.
This is a savoury choux paste — pâte à choux — deep-fried rather than baked. The recipe is sound and needs only a few clarifications about fat, temperature and technique.
- CriscoThe repeated brand name points to one of the shortening-company cookbooks of the early twentieth century, when Crisco was a recent product; the shortening in the paste can be butter and the frying fat any neutral oil. The paste itself needs only 2 tablespoons of fat, but frying takes 2-3 inches of oil in a deep pan.
- The frying temperatureThe closing warning is the hinge of the recipe. Aigrettes want a moderate fat, in the region of 350-360F — hot enough to puff them, cool enough that the cheese in the paste does not scorch before the centre sets. Much hotter and they colour well before the inside is cooked.
- Adding the eggsThe paste must be warm but not hot when the eggs go in, or they scramble. Beat each egg in completely before the next; the finished paste should fall from the spoon in a heavy, glossy ribbon.
- The 30-minute restResting firms the paste so it holds its shape on the spoon and does not spread in the oil. Do not skip it, but do not chill it so hard that it will not drop cleanly.
- The cheeseA dry, sharp grating cheese works best — aged Cheddar, Parmesan, or a Gruyère-type. Pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch and gives a slightly gritty paste; grate it yourself.
- Frying in batchesDrop no more than six or eight at a time. Crowding drops the oil temperature and the aigrettes soak fat instead of puffing. They take roughly 3-4 minutes and will usually turn themselves as they swell.
- YieldRoughly two dozen small fritters, depending on how generously the spoon is filled — enough for four as a savoury course or six or eight with drinks. They soften and sink as they cool, so serve them within a few minutes of draining.
Aigrette is French for a plume or tuft of feathers, including the tuft on an egret's head, and the name is traditionally said to have been applied in nineteenth-century cookery to small fried things that emerged spiky and irregular from the fat. Cheese aigrettes belonged to the English savoury, the small hot salt course served after the sweet at a formal dinner, and they turn up in Victorian and Edwardian household manuals alongside cheese straws and Scotch woodcock. Their appearance in an American calendar of dinners reflects two things at once: the long reach of French-trained English cookery into American middle-class menus, and the marketing of hydrogenated vegetable shortening, which such books recommended for both the paste and the deep fat on the grounds of its purity, digestibility and economy in use.