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Peach Fritters
Make a smooth batter as follows. Mix four ounces of fine flour and a small pinch of salt with two table-spoonfuls of oil, or one ounce of dissolved butter, and the well-beaten yolks of two eggs. Add very gradually one gill of tepid water, and beat the mixture with the back of a wooden spoon until it is smooth and thick. Put it aside for an hour or two, and twenty minutes before it is used add the whites of the eggs, which have been beaten to a firm froth. Skin, halve, and stone a dozen ripe peaches, dip them into the batter, and fry in boiling fat until they are crisp and lightly coloured. Drain them well, and serve piled on a dish, with a little whipped cream round them. If preferred, the cream may be omitted, and the fritters served on a napkin, with powdered sugar strewn thickly over them. Time to fry the fritters, eight or ten minutes; to drain them, five minutes. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for eight or ten persons.
A standard fritter batter of the period — enriched with yolks, rested, then lightened with whipped whites at the last minute. The only figure that needs real scrutiny is the frying time.
- A gillIn a British book, five fluid ounces, about 140 ml. Add it slowly, as directed: the batter is beaten thick first and slackened gradually, which is what keeps it lump-free.
- Four ounces of fine flourAbout 115 g, or a scant cup of all-purpose flour measured by spooning and levelling. "Fine" here probably indicates finely milled white flour, well sifted.
- Frying timeEight to ten minutes is far too long. In fat at 350–360F, batter-coated peach halves colour in two to four minutes a side; ten minutes gives a dark crust and fruit collapsed to jam. Fry until the coating is crisp and pale gold, no further.
- "Boiling fat"Fat does not boil — the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble briskly around what is dropped into it. Use a thermometer and hold 350–360F; a cube of bread browning in about a minute is the old test.
- Skinning the peachesThirty seconds in boiling water then straight into cold will slip the skins off ripe freestones. Dry the halves thoroughly before dipping or the batter will slide off.
- The whitesFold them in, do not beat them in, and do it within twenty minutes of frying as the book says. Once the foam deflates the fritters fry heavy.
- DrainingFive minutes on a rack over a warm oven, not on paper in a heap — the underside steams and softens. Sugar them only at the moment of serving.
- YieldTwelve peaches gives twenty-four fritters, enough for eight to ten as the original states.
Fruit fritters are among the oldest sweet dishes in English cookery, generally traced back to the medieval frytour, and by the late nineteenth century general cookbooks commonly carried a master batter followed by a list of fruits to dip in it. In this recipe the batter, not the peach, is the lesson: oil for tenderness, yolks for richness, a rest to let the starch hydrate, and whipped whites folded in at the last moment for lift. The "probable cost, 2s. 6d." is a reminder that peaches in Britain then were largely hothouse or wall-grown fruit from private gardens, expensive enough that a dessert for ten people may have cost something in the region of a labourer's daily wage; the same batter over apples would have cost a fraction of it.