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Bread and Butter Fritters
Make a batter with cream instead of milk. Cut some slices of bread and butter rather thin, spread half of them with strawberry jam, and cover with the other slices, press together like a sandwich, and cut into squares or rounds: dip in batter, and fry in hot butter for five minutes. Drain, then arrange neatly, sprinkle sugar over, and serve at once.
A jam sandwich fried in batter — essentially an English forerunner of the fried jam sandwich, close kin to pain perdu. The original assumes you already know how to make a frying batter, so the main work of modernising is filling in what Cassell's left unsaid.
- The batter is not givenThe recipe assumes you already know a frying batter and simply substitutes cream for milk. A workable coating batter is roughly 4 oz (1 cup) flour, a pinch of salt, an egg, and enough liquid — here cream — to make a coating consistency, about 150 ml (2/3 cup). Cream makes the batter richer and slightly thicker than a milk one, so thin it until it just coats the back of a spoon.
- Five minutes is too longThin bread and butter in a hot pan is done when the batter is set and golden, about 1 to 2 minutes a side. Five minutes will darken the batter well past pleasant and turn the jam to boiling sugar.
- Frying in butterWhole butter at frying heat will brown and then burn inside a couple of minutes. Clarified butter or ghee gives the same flavour and holds up; alternatively use a neutral oil with a knob of butter added at the end.
- Seal the edgesPress the sandwiches firmly and cut them cleanly with a sharp knife or cutter so the batter grips the cut edge. Any gap and the jam escapes into the fat, where it scorches immediately.
- BreadDay-old white bread, thinly sliced, behaves better than fresh soft sandwich loaf, which collapses when it takes up batter. Crusts off if you want tidy rounds.
- Yield and servingThe recipe fixes no quantities; a batter of the size suggested above would coat roughly a dozen small squares, enough for four to six as a hot pudding. Sprinkle with sugar off the heat and serve immediately; they go leathery within minutes.
Fritters of this kind sit in a long English line of sweet fried breads that runs back through poor knights of Windsor and pain perdu to the medieval habit of rescuing stale loaves in egg and fat. What is often said to mark this version as late Victorian is the strawberry jam and the cream: commercial preserves are generally reckoned to have become cheap and reliable by the 1870s and 1880s, and a recipe that once existed to use up stale bread here uses fresh bread and butter, jam and cream as a deliberate luxury.