Home › The Principles of Cookery › Batter Fritters
Batter Fritters
Make a batter according to recipe given for batter pudding. When ready, peel, core, and mince some apples, or if preferred, a few currants may be picked and thrown into the batter. The addition of a little suet to the apples is an improvement, but it must be very judiciously used, as too much will make the fritters greasy. They should be made small. A large table-spoonful of batter is sufficient for one fritter. Fry in boiling dripping, and serve with powdered sugar over them. Probable cost, 9d. Time to fry, eight to ten minutes. Sufficient for six persons.
A plain frying batter dropped by the spoonful with chopped apple or currants folded through. The recipe leans on the book's batter pudding entry for the batter itself, and on a fat that most kitchens no longer keep.
- The batterCassell's batter pudding batter is essentially flour, eggs and milk beaten to a thick pouring consistency; the exact proportions belong to that entry and are not repeated here. For fritters make it thicker than you would for a pudding, so a spoonful holds its shape when it hits the fat rather than spreading into lace.
- Frying temperature"Boiling dripping" means fat hot enough to bubble around a test drop of batter immediately, in modern terms roughly 350–375F. Dripping is the fat rendered from roast meat, most often beef; lard or any neutral oil with a high smoke point behaves the same way. Fat much below that soaks in, and much above it browns the outside before the batter sets.
- The timing is longEight to ten minutes is long for tablespoon-sized fritters, and the recipe does not say whether the frying is shallow or deep. In deep fat at 350–375F they are done in three to four minutes, turned once. Judge by colour and by the batter no longer being slack inside.
- Suet, used sparinglyThe warning is sound. Shredded beef suet melts into the apple and enriches it, but more than a teaspoon or so per apple leaves the fritters heavy with fat. Packaged shredded suet, beef or vegetable, works; cold grated butter is a reasonable substitute, though it browns faster.
- "Mince" the applesHere it means chop very fine, not put through a mincer. Pieces larger than about a quarter inch release juice, thin the batter, and steam rather than fry. A firm cooking apple holds up better than a soft eating variety.
- CurrantsDried currants, not fresh redcurrants. "Picked" refers to sorting out stalks and grit, which modern packaged fruit no longer needs; a rinse and thorough drying is enough, since wet fruit spits in hot fat.
- Powdered sugarIn this period that is finely ground white sugar — caster sugar, or icing sugar if you want it to cling. Dust it on while the fritters are still hot from draining.
- Yield and costSix servings; the recipe does not say how many fritters that comes to, only that a large tablespoonful of batter makes one. The 9d costing is a Victorian household figure and has no modern equivalent worth calculating.
Batter fritters belong to a very old English family of fried batters generally traced from medieval fryture through to the apple fritters still sold at fairs. Once a cook could make a batter pudding, the same batter became fritters, pancakes, or a coating for fruit, with only the consistency and the cooking medium changing. The frying fat says as much about the period as the batter does — dripping was the by-product of the Sunday roast, often said to have been saved in a basin and used for everything from frying to spreading on bread, so a dish of fritters cost almost nothing beyond the flour, eggs and apples. The insistence that the fritters be made small and the suet used judiciously is the characteristic Victorian anxiety about greasiness, a fair worry when fat temperature was governed by the state of the fire rather than a dial.