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Fritters
Make fritters quickly and beat thoroughly.
A good rule for them is two eggs, one half-pint milk, one tea-spoon salt, and two cups flour; have the lard in which to cook them nice and sweet and hot. Clarified fat boils at about five hundred degrees-more than double the heat of boiling water and fat actually boiling will burn to a cinder any thing that is dropped into it. The proper cooking heat is three hundred and seventy-five degrees, and is indicated by a blue smoke arising from the surface of the fat. When this point is reached, the fat may be held at that degree of heat, and prevented from burning by dropping into it a peeled potato or a piece of hard bread, which furnishes something for the fat to act on. The heat may also be tested by dropping in a tea-spoon of the batter; if the temperature is right it will quickly rise in a light ball with a splutter, and soon brown; take up carefully the moment they are done, with a wire spoon; drain in a hot colander, and sift powdered sugar over them; serve hot. Pork fritters are made by dipping thin bits of breakfast-bacon or fat pork in the batter: fruit fritters by chopping any kind of fresh or canned fruit fine and mixing it with batter, or by dipping quarters or halves in batter. The fruit may be improved in flavor by sprinkling sugar and grated lemon peel over it, and allowing it to remain two or three hours, after which drain and dip as above. Batters for fritters should be made an hour before using, as the grains of flour swell by standing after being moistened, and thus become lighter. Add the whites of eggs just before frying. It is better not to use sugar in batter, as it tends to make it heavy. Sprinkle over them in the dish when just ready to serve.
A master batter plus a short lecture on frying temperature, written before kitchen thermometers were common. Two of the book's claims need correcting before you light the stove.
- The batter, in modern measuresTwo eggs, one half-pint (1 cup) milk, 1 teaspoon salt, 2 cups flour. That is a thick drop batter with no chemical leavening — all the lift comes from the beaten whites folded in at the end, so separate the eggs from the start.
- Fat does not boil at 500FWhat the book calls boiling is smoking and then breaking down; lard smokes around 370–400F and fats do not boil at any usable cooking temperature. The 375F figure for frying is correct and still the standard for fritters.
- Ignore the blue smoke testBy the time fat throws visible smoke it is at or past its smoke point and beginning to degrade. Use a clip-on thermometer and hold 360–375F, or use the book's better test: a teaspoon of batter should rise promptly, splutter and colour.
- The potato and bread trickDropping in a peeled potato or crust does not hold the fat at a fixed temperature; it simply absorbs some heat and some off-flavours. Temperature control comes from the burner and from not crowding the pan — each batch drops the fat temperature noticeably.
- Quickly, but rest it anywayThe two instructions conflict only in appearance. Mix the flour, milk, yolks and salt without overworking, rest that hour so the flour hydrates, then beat and fold in the whites immediately before frying.
- Pork frittersThin batter-dipped bacon or fat pork may not cook through in the time the coating needs to brown. Safer to cook the bacon first, then dip and fry to crisp the batter.
- Fruit frittersMacerating with sugar and lemon peel draws out juice, which is why the draining step matters — wet fruit makes the batter slide off and spits in the fat. Pat the pieces dry on a towel.
- Fat and finishingLard fries beautifully; refined peanut or sunflower oil behaves the same way at these temperatures. Drain on a rack or in the hot colander as directed rather than on paper, and dust with confectioners' sugar at the table — the book is right that sugar in the batter weighs it down and scorches.
- YieldAbout 20 to 24 spoon-sized fritters, or four to six servings at breakfast.
Buckeye Cookery (Marysville, Ohio, 1877) was compiled from contributions by Ohio housewives, and this entry is typical of its method: one governing rule, then variations spun off it — pork, fresh fruit, canned fruit. The word fritter comes through Old French friture from Latin frigere, to fry, and the form is one of the oldest in European cookery, batter used as a jacket for whatever the larder held. What dates this page is the anxious paragraph on temperature. It gives numbers alongside sensory tests a cook could actually use, and the numbers came out garbled while the batter test came out sound.