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Bread and Fruit Fritters
Take twelve slices of bread and butter, cut off the crust, and let them be of equal thickness; spread them over with jam--any sort that may be liked--and make a cover with another slice; press them tightly together, and cut them into any desired form. Make a batter, as for apple fritters, dip them in, and fry in boiling lard about ten minutes; dry them before the fire on a piece of blotting-paper, and serve on a napkin with sifted sugar sprinkled over. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for a small dish.
A jam sandwich battered and deep-fried — essentially a Victorian version of the Monte Cristo, served sweet. Two things in the original need correcting: the frying time and the drying paper.
- Ten minutes is far too longBattered bread in fat at 350-375F is golden in two to three minutes, turning once. Ten minutes gives you a black crust and boiling jam that will spit and scald. Fry until the batter is set and coloured, no longer.
- "Boiling lard"Lard does not boil; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble vigorously when the batter goes in, around 350-375F. Below that the bread drinks fat and goes greasy. Lard still works well here for its high smoke point, but any neutral frying oil is fine.
- Blotting-paperVictorian kitchens kept unsized blotting paper for draining fried food. Modern blotting and printer papers may carry sizings, brighteners or inks not intended for food contact, so are best avoided. Drain on a wire rack over paper towels instead — a rack keeps the underside crisp, which sitting directly on paper does not.
- Bread and butterThe instruction means already-buttered slices, sandwich-style, not the pudding. Use a firm white loaf cut a little under half an inch thick; anything soft or open-crumbed will collapse when dipped in batter.
- Seal the edgesThe hinge of the dish. Jam that escapes into the fat burns instantly and spoils the whole panful. Spread the jam thinly and leave a clear quarter-inch border, then press the edges firmly — a dab of batter along the seam helps. A press-cutter used for rounds compresses the edge as it cuts; a knife cut does not, so keep the jam well inside the line.
- The batterA plain coating batter of the usual sort will do: roughly 4 oz flour, a pinch of salt, one egg and enough milk to make a coating consistency, rested half an hour. It should cling to the sandwich rather than run off it.
- Yield and costTwelve slices, each covered with 'another slice', reads as twelve sandwiches, though the line can be taken as six; each is then cut into two or three pieces. The book says only 'sufficient for a small dish'. The 'probable cost, 1s' is a shilling in late-Victorian money, the kind of figure Cassell attached to its entries as a matter of course so a cook could budget.
- ServingDust with icing or caster sugar and eat while hot; the jam inside stays very hot for several minutes. Fritters were conventionally sent to table on a napkin, which would also take up any residual fat, and a folded cloth on the dish still does that job.
Fritters of this kind sit at the cheap end of the Victorian sweet course: bread, a spoonful of jam, batter and a pan of lard, producing something that looked like a made dish for pennies. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, a later reworking of the Dictionary of Cookery compiled in the 1870s, was built for exactly this — thousands of short entries with a probable cost attached, aimed at households with a single servant and a fixed weekly budget. The recipe belongs to a wide family of fried bread sweets that runs from medieval pain perdu through French toast to the modern deep-fried jam sandwich, and the book files the jam-filled version plainly among the fritters. The blotting-paper instruction is the most dated detail: before absorbent kitchen paper was sold, cooks bought sheets of clean unsized blotting paper for draining anything fried, and the practice appears throughout nineteenth-century English cookbooks.