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Beignets
Dissolve one ounce of butter in half a gill of water, add one ounce and a half of flour, and mix well together over the fire; remove it, and mix in, one after the other, three beaten eggs, a pinch of salt, and three ounces of powdered white sugar. Have ready a stewpan containing clarified fat or hot lard. Make the batter into small lumps the size of cobnuts, and let them fry a nice brown. They take from ten to fifteen minutes to fry, and expand to six times the size. Sift some powdered sugar over them, and serve. Probable cost, 8d.
This is a choux paste fried rather than baked — what French cooks call beignets soufflés. The whole trick is fat that is only moderately hot, so the puffs have time to swell and set through.
- Half a gillA gill is a quarter-pint, so half a gill is 2½ fl oz (about 70 ml), a scant third of a cup. With 1 oz butter, 1½ oz flour and three eggs, this is a notably slack paste even by choux standards.
- Dry the paste"Mix well together over the fire" means beating the flour into the boiling butter and water until it forms a smooth ball that leaves the sides of the pan. A minute or two of further stirring drives off water and lets the paste take the eggs.
- Eggs off the heatAdd them one at a time, beating each in completely before the next, and only once the paste has cooled enough not to scramble them. Three eggs into this little flour gives a paste just stiff enough to drop from a spoon.
- The sugarThree ounces of sugar in so small a paste is a lot, and it makes the beignets colour fast. Half that is closer to modern practice if you find them browning before the centres set.
- CobnutsA cobnut is a cultivated hazelnut, so the lumps should be about ¾ inch across — shaped with two teaspoons rather than the hands, as the paste is too soft to roll. They really do expand several times over, so fry no more than six or eight at a time.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe says only 'clarified fat or hot lard', but moderately hot fat is what is wanted here, in the region of 300-325F (150-165C). Hotter fat sets the crust before the inside puffs, and the beignets burst or stay raw in the middle. Ten to fifteen minutes at so low a heat is plausible rather than an obvious misprint; they should be turned as they roll and come out hollow.
- Clarified fat or lardEither works. A neutral frying oil is the usual modern substitute, but lard gives the crisper shell.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; expect roughly a dozen to a score of small beignets, depending on how large the lumps are made. Sugar them straight from the pan and eat them within a few minutes — they collapse and toughen as they cool.
Fritters of choux paste are an old item of the French repertoire, sold at fairs and served as a hot sweet entremets; in French they are beignets souffly the irreverent name pets de nonne, generally traced to convent kitchens in popular accounts rather than to any documented origin. What makes them work is the same paste used for éclairs and profiteroles: the water in the dough turns to steam in the fat and inflates the egg-rich shell from within, which is why the recipe can promise expansion to six times the size. The "probable cost, 8d." was part of the book's appeal to households budgeting a dessert to the penny.