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Almond Fritters
Blanch and pound two ounces of sweet almonds with a little water; mix them gradually in one pint of new milk or cream with two table-spoonfuls of ground rice and the well-beaten yolks of four eggs, and the whites of two. Sweeten according to taste. Melt two ounces of butter in the frying-pan, and, when hot, fry the mixture a spoonful at a time. Stir it well till it is a golden-brown. Cover it with sifted sugar. Time to fry, five minutes. Probable cost, if made with milk, 1s. Sufficient for three or four persons.
This is a fritter without flour: ground rice and egg yolk carry a rich almond custard that sets in the pan. The batter is loose, so the hinge is heat control and thickness.
- Thicken the batter firstAs written the mixture is barely thicker than pouring custard and will spread and weep in the pan. Warm it gently in a saucepan, stirring, until it visibly thickens and coats the spoon, then let it cool before frying; the fritters will hold a shape and the five-minute frying time will make sense.
- Ground riceThis is rice flour, more coarsely milled than the powdery kind sold for baking. Either works; ordinary rice flour gives a smoother, slightly softer set.
- New milkMilk fresh from the dairy, unskimmed and unhomogenised. Whole milk is the substitute, and cream, as the recipe allows, gives a noticeably better fritter.
- Blanching and pounding the almondsCover the almonds with boiling water for a minute, slip off the skins, then pound or process with a spoonful of water to a paste. The water keeps them from turning to oily butter. Two ounces is a generous third to a scant half cup of whole almonds.
- Sweet almondsThe qualifier matters in Victorian books, which also sold bitter almonds. Any ordinary supermarket almond is the sweet kind.
- Frying temperatureTwo ounces of butter over moderate heat, not high; butter alone browns fast and these need long enough for the egg centre to set. If the butter darkens, wipe the pan and start with fresh.
- Sifted sugarFine sugar pushed through a sieve, closest to modern caster sugar. Confectioners' sugar dusted over the hot fritters works and stays put better.
- Yield and costThree or four servings, as the recipe states. The shilling is a later nineteenth-century price, given as the book's usual estimate of what the dish would cost to make.
Almond fritters belong to a long line of English sweet fritters descended from medieval and early modern almond cookery, when pounded almonds and almond milk did much of the work that dairy and eggs do now, particularly on fast days when milk and butter were forbidden. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the later nineteenth century the almonds had become a flavouring rather than a substitute, and the dish sits in a cluster of cheap, quickly made sweets built on the same handful of pantry staples: eggs, milk, a starch, sugar and a hot pan. Ground rice, which thickens this batter, was a Victorian household standby priced well below arrowroot and used for puddings, moulds and invalid cookery alike; its presence here, along with the careful note of a probable cost of one shilling, marks the recipe as aimed squarely at a middle-class kitchen keeping an eye on the books.