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Cream Fritters
Pound in a mortar half a dozen macaroons, two ounces of sugar, half a tea-spoonful of salt, and the rind, grated, of half a lemon. Beat up two whites and half a dozen yolks of eggs separately, with half a pint of cream, and stir all well together. Form into fritters, and fry them a light brown, both sides alike, and serve them quickly, with wine sauce and fine powdered sugar. Probable cost, 1s. 9d. Time, four to five minutes to fry. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A Victorian fried-cream fritter, and one where the written method leaves out the step that makes it work. Read the first point before you shop.
- The mixture will not "form into fritters" as writtenHalf a pint of cream, six yolks and two whites plus a few crushed macaroons is a pourable batter, not something you can shape. Dishes of this family (crema fritta, crème frite) are made by cooking the cream, eggs and sugar to a very thick pastry cream, spreading it 1/2 in. deep on a tray, chilling it firm for several hours, then cutting it into squares or diamonds, egging and crumbing them, and frying. Cassell's may be assuming that method behind its single line.
- If you keep it as a batterDrop it by spoonfuls into hot fat and treat it as a drop fritter, adding flour until it holds. The book's four to five minutes would suit shaped pieces that brown on the outside while the inside merely warms through.
- MacaroonsAlmond macaroons — the small, crisp, meringue-and-ground-almond biscuits, not the coconut or the French macaron. Amaretti are the closest supermarket equivalent. Six of them come to about 2 oz; grind them in a food processor rather than a mortar.
- Half a pintBritish imperial, so 10 fl oz, a scant 1 1/4 US cups. Use single or whipping cream; double cream will give a stiffer custard.
- Frying fat and heatDeep fat at around 350-360F. Hotter and the crumb colours before the centre softens; cooler and the coating soaks. "Both sides alike" is a common instruction in period fritter recipes, and matters more here than usual because the pale interior shows through any thin patch.
- Wine sauceA Victorian sweet wine sauce: sugar, sherry or Madeira and a little butter, thickened with egg yolk or a scrap of cornflour and served warm. No modern bottled product corresponds to it.
- YieldFive or six as the book says, if served as one course among several. As a standalone dessert, count on three or four.
- The cost1s. 9d. is about twenty-one old pence, offered so a housekeeper could price the dish against her weekly book. It has no useful modern equivalent.
Fried cream is older than this book by centuries: a thick, set custard, cut up, crumbed and fried, it appears in Italian kitchens as crema fritta and in French ones as crème frite, and English cookery took it up as a genteel fritter for the sweet course. The macaroons are the giveaway of its confectioner's ancestry — pounded almond biscuits were one way of giving body and almond flavour to a cream. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for late-nineteenth-century middle-class households, prints thousands of such entries in severely condensed form, with a probable cost, a time and a number served; in that compression a step as essential as chilling the cream firm can drop out of the instructions altogether.