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Rice-Flour Puffs
Take a pint of flour, and add to it a tea-spoonful of salt and a pint of boiling water. Beat up four eggs, stir them into the mixture, put from two to three table-spoonfuls of lard into a pan, make it boiling hot, and fry as in the case of common fritters.
A scalded batter fried in shallow fat — closer to a plain choux paste than to a wet dropped fritter. The heading names rice flour; the instructions just say "flour," and rice flour is what makes the puffs light and crisp rather than gluey.
- Read the title as an ingredientThe heading names rice flour while the instructions say only "flour," so use rice flour. Fine white rice flour behaves best; coarse stone-ground rice flour stays gritty.
- A pint of flour is a volume, not a weightFlour was scooped by the measure. A US pint is 2 cups; an imperial pint is 20 fl oz, a quarter more again. Any weight equivalent is approximate, and rice flour is denser than wheat, so weigh to the lower figure and hold back a little liquid until you see how the batter behaves.
- Equal volumes of flour and boiling waterThat is deliberate. Pouring boiling water onto the flour gelatinises the starch, and the resulting stiff paste is what traps steam and puffs in the fat. Stir the water in all at once and beat until smooth.
- The hinge: cool before the eggs go inBeaten eggs stirred into paste still near boiling will scramble and the puffs will not rise. Let the mixture drop to hand-warm, then beat the eggs in one at a time to a thick batter that holds its shape on the spoon.
- Frying fat and depthTwo or three tablespoonfuls in a pan means shallow frying, and puffs of this type do better with more fat than that — an inch of lard, shortening or a neutral oil at 350–360°F. Drop by spoonfuls, turn once, and allow three to four minutes total; the inside must set or they collapse.
- Don't crowd the panThese expand considerably. Four or five at a time in a 10-inch pan keeps the fat temperature up and stops them fusing.
- Yield and servingMakes a large batch of small puffs. The batter is unsweetened, so serve them dusted with sugar, with jam or stewed fruit, or plain alongside a savoury dish.
This sits among the plain fried batters of the late Victorian kitchen, where "puff" was often used of something that swelled in hot fat rather than of a pastry. The scalding method — boiling liquid poured onto flour, eggs beaten in once the paste has cooled — works on the same principle as choux paste, and the technique appears in period cookery books for both baked and fried sweets. Rice flour was readily obtainable in Britain in the later nineteenth century and was often recommended for invalid and nursery cookery as lighter and easier to digest than wheat. Its use here also reflects the era's habit of substituting one flour for another: rice, arrowroot, potato flour and cornflour all appear in books of this kind, each producing a noticeably different crumb.