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Polish Fritters
Take a few lumps of sugar, rasp them on the rind of half a lemon, and then crush them to powder, mix with it a quarter of a nutmeg, grated. Make a batter of four eggs, half a pint of milk, a quarter of a pint of cream, an ounce of oiled butter, and six ounces of warm flour. Take the mixture a spoonful at a time and drop into hot fat, sprinkling currants plentifully over each just before dropping it in. Dust with icing sugar before serving. Probable cost, 1s. 2d.
A drop-batter fritter, closer to a beignet or a doughnut hole than to anything wrapped around fruit. The batter is loose, so the hinge is fat temperature: too cool and the spoonfuls flatten and soak, too hot and the outsides colour before the eggy centre sets.
- Rasping sugar on the lemonRubbing sugar lumps against the rind was the standard way to capture the zest oils before microplanes. The finely grated zest of half a lemon worked into an ounce or two of caster sugar gives much the same result; the recipe says only "a few lumps". A quarter of a nutmeg is roughly half a teaspoon grated.
- Where the flavoured sugar goesThe recipe never says explicitly. It belongs in the batter, beaten in with the eggs; the icing sugar at the end is separate.
- MeasuresHalf a pint of milk is 10 fl oz in imperial terms (about 1 1/4 US cups), a quarter pint of cream 5 fl oz. Six ounces of flour is about 1 1/3 cups, though weighing is safer with a batter this wet.
- Warm flour and oiled butterFlour was warmed by the fire so it would take up liquid smoothly and not chill the batter; a few minutes in a low oven does it, or skip it if your kitchen is not cold. "Oiled butter" means butter melted gently until liquid but not browned, then cooled slightly so it does not scramble the eggs.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe says only "hot fat"; around 350-360F suits a batter like this. Fry four or five spoonfuls at a time so the temperature does not crash, and give them three to four minutes, turning once, until deep gold all through. Cut one open before committing to the batch.
- The currantsSprinkling currants over each spoonful just before it goes in keeps them from sinking to the bottom of the bowl, but it also leaves them proud of the surface where they scorch. Pressing them lightly into the batter on the spoon is more reliable.
- YieldEnough batter for roughly 20 to 24 walnut-sized fritters. They are best within ten minutes of frying; dust with icing sugar only at the moment of serving or it dissolves.
- The costing1s. 2d. is a per-dish estimate for the household books, not an instruction. Cassell's gave these throughout so a cook could compare dishes at a glance.
Cassell's uses "Polish" loosely, as Victorian cookery books used "Russian" or "Bohemian" — a gesture toward Central and Eastern Europe rather than a documented origin. The dish belongs to the wide family of spoon-dropped enriched batters fried in deep fat, of which the Polish pączki is the best-known relative, though those are yeast-raised and shaped rather than dropped. What marks this version as late nineteenth-century English is the equipment it assumes: a deep pan of hot fat kept on a range, flour warmed by the fire, and sugar in lumps to be crushed at home. The lemon-and-nutmeg pairing with currants is thoroughly English and would have been familiar from puddings and buns of the same period.