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Carrot Fritters
Boil a large carrot until is quite tender. Beat it to a pulp, pass it through a sieve, and mix with it two table-spoonfuls of cream, the same of finely-grated bread-crumbs, and two eggs well beaten. Shape into fritters and fry in hot lard or dripping, and serve them with good brown sauce. Sufficient for two persons.
A simple Victorian vegetable fritter that hinges entirely on getting the purée dry enough to hold a shape. Everything else is straightforward.
- Drain the carrot hardA boiled carrot carries a great deal of water, and wet pulp will slump in the pan. Drain it, return it to the dry pan over low heat for a minute or two to steam off moisture, then purée and cool before adding the eggs.
- Sieve or ricer"Pass it through a sieve" means forcing the pulp through a fine mesh with the back of a spoon to remove fibre. A potato ricer or food mill does the same job in seconds; a food processor gives a slacker, gummier purée.
- Bread-crumbsFinely-grated crumbs here means dry crumbs from stale bread, not the coarse fresh kind. They are the only binder besides egg, so add a spoonful more if the mixture will not hold together on the spoon.
- Two eggs is generousTwo whole eggs to one carrot gives a batter closer to a drop fritter than a shaped one. If you want fritters you can genuinely shape, use one egg plus a yolk, or add crumbs until the mass is firm.
- Lard or drippingBoth are still available and both fry well; beef dripping gives the savoury note the brown sauce assumes. Any neutral oil substitutes. Shallow-fry at about 350F, in a pan deep enough that the fat does not boil over when the wet mixture goes in.
- Brown sauceNot bottled brown sauce. In Victorian usage this generally means a roux-based espagnole or a reduced meat gravy, so a good beef or veal stock thickened with browned flour is the likely accompaniment.
- YieldThe original's "sufficient for two persons" suggests a small side dish or savoury course rather than a main course; the recipe gives no number of fritters.
Fritters of this kind belong to a large family of Victorian vegetable entremets, in which a boiled root was pulped, bound with egg and crumb, and fried to make something more interesting than a plain buttered vegetable. The carrot in nineteenth-century English cookery sat on both sides of the sweet-savoury line: it went into puddings and tarts for its sugar, and equally into savoury dishes served with a meat gravy. The technique — purée, sieve, bind, fry, sauce — is essentially the classical French croquette method scaled down for a domestic kitchen, and the instruction to sieve the pulp reflects a period preoccupation with smoothness.