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Beignet of Strawberries
Prepare a batter as in the previous recipe. Put the strawberries raw into this batter, and fry them a spoonful at a time. Dish them in a pyramid, and sift sugar between them and over them. Raspberries and other fruit may be done in the same way.
A fruit fritter stripped to its essentials: the entry assumes you have already read the batter recipe above it and know how deep frying behaves. Two things decide whether it works — a dry berry and hot enough fat.
- The missing batterThe entry depends on a batter recipe printed above it, which is not reproduced here. Any standard fritter batter — flour, egg, and enough liquid to make a coating about the thickness of heavy cream — that clings to the back of a spoon will do; a stiff batter will slide off wet fruit.
- Dry the fruit firstHull the strawberries and blot them thoroughly on a cloth or paper. Surface moisture is why batter slips away and why the fat spits. Berries hulled long in advance leach juice and are worse still.
- Fat temperature350–375F. Below that the batter absorbs fat and stays pale; above it the coating colours before the fruit inside has warmed through. A spoonful should take about two minutes, turned once.
- "A spoonful at a time"This most likely means a spoonful of batter with several small berries in it dropped as one cluster, rather than one berry per fritter. Fry only a few at a time so the fat does not drop in temperature.
- Choice of fruitFirm, slightly underripe strawberries hold their shape; fully ripe ones collapse into juice inside the shell. Raspberries, as the recipe suggests, are more fragile still and are better combined into small groups.
- Dishing and sugarDrain on paper, then sift caster or icing sugar between the layers and over the top as you build the pyramid, as the recipe directs. Serve immediately; fritters go soft within minutes.
Beignet is simply the French for fritter, and its appearance here — in a dictionary written for English households — reflects how thoroughly late-Victorian cookery had absorbed French kitchen vocabulary, often keeping the French name for a dish that English cooks had been making as "fritters" for centuries. Batter-fried fruit is very old: medieval and early modern English cookery books give apple and elder-flower fritters long before strawberries were cultivated at any scale. The closing line about raspberries and other fruit suggests that the technique was the point, and that the cook used whatever the season had produced.