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Arrowroot Fritters
Put a pint of new milk and a table-spoonful of sugar into a saucepan with three or four bay-leaves. When it boils, stir into it a quarter of a pound of arrowroot which has been smoothly mixed with a little cold water; then add the beaten yolks of four eggs. Stir it constantly until it is thick and smooth; then pour it into a well-oiled pie-dish, and bake in a good oven. Allow the mixture to cool; then stamp it out in rounds; dip them in egg and breadcrumbs; fry them in hot lard, and heap them in a dish. Serve with jam sauce. Time, twenty minutes to boil; ten minutes to bake; five minutes to fry. Sufficient for four or five persons. Probable cost, 1s., without the jam.
This is a stiff arrowroot panada, set firm, cut into rounds, crumbed and fried — closer to a cromesquis or fried custard than to a batter fritter. Success turns almost entirely on how firmly and how thoroughly the base sets.
- Chill it properlyThe instruction to "allow the mixture to cool" understates the case: the slab needs to be refrigerated until cold and rubbery right through, at least two hours, before it will stamp into rounds that survive crumbing and frying. Warm or barely cool, it will slump in the fat.
- Slake the arrowrootMixing the arrowroot "smoothly" with a little cold water first is not optional — dry starch hitting boiling milk seizes into lumps. Use about the same volume of cold water as arrowroot and stir it to a cream.
- Arrowroot behaves unlike flourIt thickens almost instantly at just below boiling, then thins again if held at a hard boil. Take the pan to the barest simmer, stir until it pulls away from the sides, and stop. Cornflour is the closest substitute if arrowroot is dear, though it sets slightly cloudier and softer.
- QuantitiesA pint is 20 fl oz in this book (Imperial), so roughly 2 1/2 cups of milk to 4 oz (about 3/4 cup) arrowroot. That ratio is far heavier than a pouring custard and is meant to produce something you can cut with a knife.
- "New milk"Fresh whole milk, unskimmed and unsoured. Ordinary full-fat milk is the equivalent; the fat matters here for texture, so do not use skimmed.
- "A good oven"The book gives no temperatures; a moderately hot oven, perhaps around 375-400F, is the usual modern reading. The ten minutes in the oven appears to serve only to dry and firm the surface of an already-cooked mixture rather than to bake it through.
- FryingLard at 350-365F. Five minutes may be generous for a cold, already-cooked round; three to four minutes, turning once, is usually enough to colour the crumb. (The recipe does not say how large the rounds should be stamped.)
- Bay in sweet milkThree or four leaves in a pint is a strong infusion; two is plenty for modern palates unless the bay is old and faded. Fish them out before the arrowroot goes in.
- Jam sauce and yieldJam sauce of this period is usually jam warmed with a little water and lemon juice, then strained. The recipe gives four to five persons; the 1s. probable cost is stated as being without the jam.
Arrowroot — the starch washed from the rhizomes of Maranta arundinacea, grown commercially in St Vincent and elsewhere in the West Indies — reached British kitchens chiefly as an invalid food, valued because it was thought bland, digestible and free of the coarse matter of wheat flour. Cassell's carries a run of arrowroot entries that begin with gruels and puddings for the sickroom and then work outward into dishes such as this, where the same expensive white starch is pressed into a made dish for the dinner table. The technique is often described as French practice of the period: cook a starch base very stiff, set it, cut it, crumb it and fry it, a method applied indifferently to semolina, rice, ground almonds or, as here, arrowroot. The bay leaf infused in sweet milk is a Victorian habit worth noticing — a savoury aromatic used where a later cook would reach for vanilla, at a time when laurel, lemon peel and cinnamon seem to have done much of its work.