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Vanities
Beat two eggs, stir in a pinch of salt and a half tea-spoon rose-water, add sifted flour till just thick enough to roll out, cut with a cake-cutter, and fry quickly in hot lard. Sift powdered sugar on them while hot, and when cool put a tea-spoon of jelly in the center of each one. Nice for tea or dessert. - Mrs. D. C. Harrington, Westfield, N. Y.
An egg-and-flour dough with no leavening, no sugar and no liquid but the eggs themselves — the puff comes entirely from steam, which means the dough must be rolled thin and the fat must be genuinely hot.
- Roll it thinThe recipe says only "thick enough to roll out," but with no leavening the lift comes from steam, so a thin sheet (roughly 1/8 inch) will blister in the fat where a thick one tends to fry dense. A thin round also gives a better seat for the spoonful of jelly.
- Flour quantity is deliberately vague"Sifted flour till just thick enough to roll out" is a judgement call, not an omission. Expect somewhere around 1 to 1 1/2 cups for two eggs, added a spoonful at a time; stop as soon as the dough will roll without sticking rather than working it stiff.
- Fat temperature"Hot lard" is left to the cook's judgement here; the book gives no thermometer readings. In modern terms the usual deep-frying range, around 365-375F, suits these: cooler and the pieces soak instead of puffing, much hotter and they colour before the inside sets. Any neutral fat with a high smoke point will stand in for lard.
- Depth of fatThe recipe says only to fry in hot lard. An inch and a half to two inches is enough for the rounds to float and turn; they cook fast, in about a minute a side, and want watching.
- Rose-waterStill sold, but strength varies a great deal between bottles, so half a teaspoon may be a faint perfume or quite assertive. Taste yours and adjust rather than assuming equivalence.
- Powdered sugarSift it on while the pieces are hot so it clings and partly melts. The jelly goes in only once they are cool, or it will slump straight through the sugar.
- Cake-cutterAny plain round cutter; a small one, on the order of a couple of inches, keeps the pieces to a size that takes a teaspoon of jelly.
- YieldDepending on how thin you roll and how large the cutter, two eggs will give perhaps a dozen and a half to two dozen small rounds. They are best eaten the day they are made; the sugared crust softens on standing.
"Vanities" belong to a large family of fried egg pastries — cousins to Pennsylvania German nothings, Scandinavian fattigmann and Italian cenci — in which flour, eggs and a flavouring are rolled thin and dropped into hot fat, the name usually explained as a comment on how much air the finished thing contains for how little substance, though that reading is traditional rather than documented. The book appeared in 1876 as The Centennial Buckeye Cook Book and was reissued in revised form in 1877 as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping; it collected such contributions by name and town, and Mrs. Harrington's entry is typical of its tea-table pastries: there is no leavening, the eggs and steam doing the work, and no sugar in the dough.