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Bread and Parsley Fritters
Pour boiling water on six ounces of bread without crust, cover it up for an hour, and then beat it up with a fork until quite smooth; add and mix thoroughly an ounce of finely-chopped parsley, pepper and salt to taste, and four eggs, well beaten. Fry, in fritters, a nice brown, and serve with brown sauce. Time to fry, five minutes. Probable cost, about 6d.
A frugal Victorian fritter that is essentially a savoury bread panade bound with egg. The original assumes you know how wet the mixture should be, and that is where it succeeds or fails.
- Drain the bread hardSix ounces of crustless bread (about 6 slices from a sandwich loaf, or 170 g) will absorb far more water than it needs. Squeeze it out firmly in your hands or a cloth before beating, or the batter will slump in the pan and never brown.
- Consistency to aim forAfter the four beaten eggs go in you want a thick, spoonable paste that holds a mound on the spoon, not a pourable batter. If it is loose, beat in a tablespoon or two of fine dry breadcrumbs rather than flour.
- Parsley quantityAn ounce of chopped parsley is roughly half a cup; flat-leaf gives more flavour for the weight. Chop it fine and dry it well; wet parsley thins the mixture.
- Frying"Fry in fritters" here means shallow-frying spoonfuls in about half an inch of hot fat or oil, or deep-frying. The book gives no temperature; aim for fat hot enough to brown them within the five minutes it allows, turning tablespoon-sized fritters once. Smaller ones will be done sooner.
- Brown sauceThe book means a proper meat-based espagnole or a simple flour-and-stock gravy browned in the pan, not bottled brown sauce of the HP kind. A good beef or chicken stock thickened with browned butter and flour is closer to the intent.
- Yield and servingThe quantities make roughly 12 to 16 small fritters, enough for four as a savoury course or side. They are best straight from the pan; reheating turns them dense.
- SeasoningBread and egg alone are bland, so season the mixture more assertively than feels natural. Taste a fried scrap before committing the batch.
- The cost note"About 6d." is sixpence in pre-decimal currency, a period price marker rather than anything usable; the book quotes it to show this was cheap food.
Fritters of this kind belong to the Victorian tradition of using up stale bread rather than throwing it out -- a habit shared by the panades, bread sauces and bread puddings. The technique is old and pan-European: soften crumb in liquid, bind with egg, fry. Parsley was a common green seasoning in the nineteenth-century English kitchen, and a savoury fritter served with brown sauce might have appeared either as a small entree or as one of the hot savouries that closed a dinner.