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FRUIT FRITTERS, BATTER FOR (another and richer way)
Beat the yolks and whites of two eggs separately, add half a pint of cream, a little salt and enough flour to form a thick batter; beat until smooth, and put in fruit as above; fry in boiling fat, and dry before the fire on a sieve. Serve on a napkin, with white sugar sifted over the fritters. Time, about three minutes to fry. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A rich separated-egg batter for frying fruit, written with the assumptions of a late-Victorian kitchen: imperial measures, an open fire, and a cook who already knows what a coating batter should look like.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe hinge: the whites are beaten separately for lift. Modern practice is to fold them into the finished batter at the last moment and fry immediately, though the recipe itself directs only that the batter be beaten until smooth.
- Half a pint of creamAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so this is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. Single or light cream is closer to Victorian "cream" than modern heavy cream; heavy cream will need a little milk to loosen it.
- "Enough flour" is genuinely vagueFor 10 fl oz of cream and two yolks, expect somewhere near 1 to 1½ cups of flour. Judge by behaviour rather than volume: the batter should coat a slice of fruit thickly and fall from the spoon in a slow ribbon.
- "Boiling fat"Fat does not boil; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble furiously around whatever is dropped in, roughly 350-375F. Below that the batter absorbs oil, above it the outside colours before the fruit heats through.
- "Fruit as above""Fruit as above" refers back to the fruit named in the preceding entries, which are not reproduced here; firm sliced fruit such as apple rings is the usual candidate. Pat the fruit thoroughly dry, or the batter slides off in the fat.
- Drying before the fireThis is the Victorian substitute for a draining rack in a warm oven. Set the fritters on a wire rack over a tray in a 200F oven while you fry the rest, so the undersides stay crisp.
- TimingThree minutes is right for thin apple or pineapple slices at the correct fat temperature; thick pieces of pear or a whole apricot half will want a minute or two more. Fry in small batches so the fat does not drop below temperature.
- Serving and yieldFour to five as written, which is a modest quantity by modern portioning. The napkin is a folded linen cloth on the serving dish that absorbs residual fat; a paper-lined platter does the same job. Sift the sugar over at the table, not before, or it dissolves into the crust.
Fritter batters run through English cookery books for centuries, and Cassell's cookery dictionary offers this one, described simply as "another and richer way" because it substitutes cream for milk and lightens the whole with separately whisked whites. That progression by expense is characteristic of the book, which was written for households of very different means and prints a "probable cost" against nearly every entry ime the same sum might buy several pounds of potatoes. The technique itself, folding beaten whites into a batter, is the same principle as the French pâte à frire. Serving fried food on a napkin was standard table practice of the period, and survives in the folded paper doily still found under fritters and fried whitebait.