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Potato Fritters
Bake three or four large potatoes. Burst them open, and scoop out the floury part with a spoon. Beat four ounces of this flour well, and mix with it a table-spoonful of thick cream, a table-spoonful of sherry or brandy, two table-spoonfuls of sugar, a table-spoonful of lemon-juice, a little flavouring, and the well-beaten yolks of three and the whites of two eggs. Beat the batter for several minutes until it is quite smooth. Make some lard or dripping hot in the frying-pan, and drop into it the mixture, a large table-spoonful at a time. Two or three table-spoonfuls can be fried together, but they must be kept apart. When the fritters are nicely browned, dry them upon blotting-paper, serve them piled high on a white napkin, and sift powdered sugar thickly over them; send wine sauce to table with them. Time to fry the fritters, from five to seven minutes. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A sweet dessert fritter built on baked potato rather than flour batter — the potato supplies both starch and a light, almost cloud-like texture. The recipe is workable as written, but a few of its terms and quantities need translating.
- The hinge: use the potato hot and dryBake the potatoes rather than boiling them (the book gives no temperature; a hot oven of about 400F for roughly an hour is the usual modern equivalent for large ones), split them at once and scoop while steaming so the moisture escapes. A waxy or waterlogged potato gives a slack batter that spreads and soaks up fat instead of puffing.
- "Four ounces of this flour"This means four ounces by weight of the scooped floury potato flesh, roughly 115 g. It is not potato flour or starch. Three or four large baking potatoes yield far more than that, so the surplus is yours to use elsewhere.
- A little flavouringVictorian shorthand for grated nutmeg, lemon zest, or a few drops of vanilla or almond essence. A quarter teaspoon of grated nutmeg or the zest of the lemon you have just juiced suits the sherry and cream.
- Egg proportionsThree yolks but only two whites. The extra yolk enriches; the reduced quantity of white may simply keep the batter thick enough to hold its shape off the spoon, though the book does not say. The recipe has the whites well beaten and beaten into the batter, but folding them in last will give a lighter fritter.
- Frying fat and temperatureLard or beef dripping suit this batter; otherwise use a neutral oil. The book gives no temperature; around 340-350F works. Note that the recipe specifies a frying-pan, so this is shallow frying, not deep fat. Five to seven minutes is right for fritters this thick at that temperature — they need time for the centre to set, and hotter fat will brown the outside long before that happens.
- Blotting-paperAn absorbent unsized paper once kept for ink. Use paper towels or a rack over a warm tray; do not use printed paper of any kind.
- Wine saucePeriod wine sauces vary: commonly sugar, sherry or Madeira and a little butter, and in some versions an egg yolk, warmed and whisked until it thickens. Send it hot in a jug; the sifted sugar on the fritters is in addition, not instead.
- Yield and timingFive or six as the book says, allowing two or three fritters each. Fry in small batches and serve immediately; fritters lose their lightness soon after leaving the pan.
Potato fritters of this kind belong to the long Victorian tradition of sweet fritters — apple, orange, rice, semolina — served as a light pudding or sweet course, and the potato earned its place because baked floury flesh behaves much like a starch panada, binding cream and eggs into something that puffs when it hits hot fat. The "probable cost, 10d." is characteristic of the book, which priced nearly every dish so that a household could budget a menu in advance; tenpence for a dessert serving six marks this as a thrifty way to finish a meal in a middle-class kitchen, with the sherry or brandy and the wine sauce doing the work of making a potato look like a luxury.