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Italian Fritters
1 egg, 1 cup milk, grated rind 1 lemon, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 5 slices stale cake, 1/2 teaspoon powdered cinnamon, sugar and few grains salt. Cake should be about a 1/4 of an inch thick, not less. Cut out into oval or round shapes with cutter. Beat egg, mix with milk, lemon rind, salt, and about 1 teaspoon sugar. Lay slices of cake in this custard until they are soft, but not crumbly; time will depend upon how stale cake is. Heat 1/2 Crisco in frying pan, lift few pieces of cake up carefully and lay them in hot Crisco. Brown 1 side, then turn them over and brown other side also. Add some pieces of Crisco as required. Mix cinnamon with 2 teaspoons sugar and sprinkle some of these over each fritter. Serve with hard sauce.
A cake-based cousin of French toast, from one of the Crisco promotional cookbooks. It succeeds or fails on one thing: how long the cake sits in the custard.
- The soaking is the hingeStale, dry cake takes the custard in seconds; a moist pound cake or sponge only a day old may take none at all. Dip, count to three, look at the edge, and lift while the slice still holds together on the spatula. Anything that sags is already lost.
- CriscoAn all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening, launched in 1911 and the reason this book exists. Modern Crisco has been reformulated to cut its trans fats and works the same here; clarified butter or a neutral oil is a better-tasting substitute, since butter alone will brown too fast at the temperature the sugar in the cake demands.
- "Heat 1/2 Crisco"A printing slip. Read it as half of the 2 tablespoons, with more added as the pan dries out, which is what the later instruction says. Keep the fat shallow rather than deep.
- Pan heatMedium, around 350F if you are measuring. Cake is already sweet, and sugar on the cut surface will scorch before the custard sets if the fat is at the temperature you would use for potatoes.
- Stale cakePlain cake is meant here: pound cake, sponge, a leftover layer without frosting. Iced or heavily filled cake will dissolve into the custard and burn in the pan.
- Hard sauceNot a cooked sauce. Beat softened butter with about twice its weight in confectioners' sugar and flavour with vanilla, brandy or a little of the lemon rind, then chill firm so it melts over the hot fritters.
- YieldFive slices, so two or three servings as a dessert or a breakfast dish. The custard quantity is generous and will soak more cake if you have it.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks what to do with a new product. Crisco reached the market in 1911, and books like this one worked it into every course, including desserts where lard or butter had previously been assumed. The fritter itself is much older than the shortening, and is essentially the thrift dish known across Europe as pain perdu or poor knights — stale bread or cake revived in egg and milk and fried. The "Italian" label was applied loosely in Anglo-American cookbooks of the period, often signalling little more than lemon rind and cinnamon; it is not evidence of a specific regional original, though sweet fried cake and bread slices are a real and long-standing part of Italian home cooking.