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Strawberry Fritters
Have large, ripe strawberries, remove hulls and clean them thoroughly. Moisten each berry with little brandy, roll in sugar and stand till berries absorb considerable sweetness. Roll them in finest possible breadcrumbs and drop into hot Crisco. Sprinkle strawberries with powdered sugar when taking up, and serve with them sweetened whipped cream. Care must be taken that strawberries are not too ripe. They must be quite hard and firm to be perfectly satisfactory when served.
A fried fruit fritter with no batter at all — the crumbs stick to the sugared, brandy-damp surface of the berry. That makes berry selection the whole recipe.
- Firm berries onlyThe original says it twice, and it is the hinge. A fully ripe berry collapses in the fat and floods the pan with juice. Choose berries still pale at the shoulders, large enough to handle, and reject any that dent under a fingertip.
- Crisco and frying temperatureCrisco is still sold, and any neutral shortening or oil behaves the same. Bring it to 350-360F and fry only until the crumb coating colours, roughly 30 to 60 seconds; longer and the fruit inside turns to jam.
- Making the crumbs adhereWith no egg or batter, the coating depends entirely on the tacky syrup that forms as the sugar draws juice out. Let the sugared berries stand 20 to 30 minutes, then roll in dry, fine white breadcrumbs and fry at once — the coating loosens if they sit.
- "Finest possible breadcrumbs"This means dry crumbs sieved fine, not fresh crumbs and not panko, which is too coarse and shard-like to cling. Stale white bread grated and passed through a sieve gives the right texture.
- The brandyA teaspoon or so per portion of berries is enough to wet the surfaces. It can be left out, though the fruit will then be slightly less inclined to hold sugar; a little orange liqueur works in its place.
- DrainingLift onto paper for a few seconds before dusting with powdered sugar. Sugar applied to a greasy surface goes translucent and slides off.
- Yield and servingThe book gives no quantity. Figure 6 to 8 large berries per person as a dessert course, fried in small batches and served immediately with lightly sweetened whipped cream — they do not hold.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of the recipe books Procter & Gamble published in the years after Crisco went on sale in 1911, written by Marion Harris Neil; the brand name appears in the instructions of nearly every recipe, which is the point of the book. Deep-fried fruit fritters were long established by then — apple and banana fritters in egg batter were standard American dessert-course fare — but a crumb-coated strawberry is a more delicate and more fashionable proposition, of a piece with the era's taste for fruit dressed up with brandy and powdered sugar. The insistence on firm, underripe fruit also reflects a period when strawberries were a short local season rather than a year-round import, and a cook picked over what the season gave her.