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Apple Fritters (Three eggs beaten very light)
Three eggs beaten very light, one quart of milk; make a thin batter; add a little salt and the grated rind of one lemon; pare, core and slice thin one quart nice tart apples; add, and drop in spoonfuls in boiling lard; serve with sauce. - Mrs. E. L. Fay, Wash ington Heights, New York.
A batter recipe written for cooks who judged consistency by eye: the flour is never specified, and the quantities make a very large batch. Read it as a ratio rather than a formula.
- The missing flour"Make a thin batter" from 3 eggs and a quart of milk means roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of flour, but the original genuinely gives no figure. Aim for something that coats an apple slice and drips slowly off the spoon, closer to heavy cream than to pancake batter.
- Scale it downA quart of milk plus a quart of sliced apples yields something on the order of five dozen fritters. Halving or quartering the recipe is sensible unless you are feeding a boardinghouse.
- Frying fat and temperatureBoiling lard means fat at 350-375F, not literally boiling. Below that the fritters absorb grease; above it the outside colors before the apple softens. Any neutral high-smoke-point fat works, though lard gives the crispest crust.
- Batter thin enough to matterWith a thin batter the apple slices must be stirred in and lifted out with batter clinging to them, a spoonful at a time. Fry in small batches so the fat temperature does not crash.
- Apple choice"Nice tart apples" means a firm cooking variety that holds its shape: Granny Smith, Northern Spy, Braeburn. Sliced thin, about 1/8 inch, they cook through in the two to three minutes the batter needs to brown.
- A quart of applesMeasured sliced, that is roughly 4 medium apples, about 1 1/4 lb before paring.
- The sauceNo sauce is specified. Period options include a hard sauce of butter and sugar, a thin lemon or wine sauce, or simply maple syrup; the grated lemon rind in the batter may point toward a lemon sauce.
- ServingDrain on paper or a rack, not a covered dish, and serve at once. Fritters steam themselves soggy within minutes of being stacked.
Fritters of this kind — fruit suspended in a milk-and-egg batter and dropped into deep fat — run through English and American cookery from the medieval period onward, and by the 1870s they appeared at breakfast as readily as at dessert. Deep frying at home was practical in a household that rendered its own lard and kept a kettle of it, and apples were among the fruits a Midwestern kitchen could count on from autumn barrel storage well into spring. Buckeye Cookery, first published in 1877 at Marysville, Ohio, was assembled from contributions solicited by name, which is why recipes like this one carry an attribution such as Mrs. E. L. Fay of Washington Heights, New York.