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Fig Fritters
Cut some good moist figs into halves, put two chopped cherries in each, and close them up again. Dip them in batter made with cream and eggs, and fry in boiling fat for three or four minutes until brown. Serve with almond sauce (see ALMOND SAUCE). Probable cost, 8d.
A two-line Victorian fritter that assumes you already know how to make a frying batter and have almond sauce on hand. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- Which figs"Good moist figs" most likely means dried figs soft enough to open without cracking, rather than fresh fruit. Modern dried figs are usually firm enough to need 20 minutes' soak in warm water or wine, then thorough drying. Fresh figs also work but release juice and will thin the batter on contact.
- The cherriesIn a book of this date these are most likely glacé (candied) cherries rather than fresh. Two chopped ones per fig make a sweet, resinous filling that holds together in the fat; fresh cherries will weep.
- Batter proportionsNone are given. A workable cream-and-egg frying batter is 4 oz flour, 2 eggs and enough cream to reach thick-coating consistency — about 4 fl oz. It should cling to a fig without running off. Let it stand 20 minutes before use.
- "Boiling fat"Fat does not boil; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble vigorously when the batter goes in, roughly 350-375F. Below that the batter drinks fat, above it the outside colours before the fig heats through.
- Three or four minutesThat is a long time for a coated fig at modern frying temperature. At 365F you will have deep brown fritters in two to three minutes, turned once.
- Sealing the halvesThe hinge of the dish: press the two fig halves firmly back together and coat them well, so the cherry filling is fully enclosed. Sugar leaking into hot fat spits and burns black in seconds.
- Almond sauceThe cross-reference points to a separate entry, almost certainly a sweet almond custard or milk sauce. Warm cream infused with ground almonds, sweetened and lightly thickened, serves the purpose.
- Yield and servingA dozen figs gives a dozen fritters, enough for four to six as a sweet course. Drain on paper, dust with caster sugar and serve at once - fritter batter softens within minutes.
- The cost noteEightpence was the estimated cost of the whole dish when the book was published, given so a cook could price a menu. It is a period detail, not a quantity.
Fritters of this kind — fruit dipped in egg batter and fried — run continuously through English cookery from the medieval fritour onward, and by the late nineteenth century they are often said to have filled the same slot on a dinner menu that a hot pudding or a sweet entrée might: quick, showy, made from store-cupboard goods. The figs themselves are the tell. Dried figs came into Britain in quantity from Turkey and the eastern Mediterranean, pressed into boxes and sold by the pound. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery is arranged alphabetically and written for the cook of a middling household, which explains the terseness here: the batter, the frying fat and the almond sauce all have their own entries elsewhere in the book, so this page only needs to tell you what is peculiar to figs.