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Snowball Fritters
Break three fresh eggs into a bowl, take out the specks, and beat the eggs well. Mix with them three-quarters of a pint of sour cream, and add gradually as much flour as will make a batter so stiff that a fork will stand upright in it. Stir into this a quarter of a pint of beer, and add a table-spoonful of sugar, a pinch of salt, and a few cardamom-seeds. Make half a pound of butter or fat boiling hot in a sautepan, drop the batter into this from the end of a spoon, and fry the snowballs till they are lightly set. Drain them on a sieve covered with blotting-paper, and serve on a neatly-folded napkin. Sift powdered sugar thickly over them. The fat in which the fritters were fried should be clarified, and may be used for a similar purpose again and again. Time to fry, four or five minutes. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A drop-batter fritter leavened by nothing but beaten egg and beer, fried in shallow butter. The batter consistency is the whole recipe: too slack and the balls flatten into pancakes.
- The fork test"So stiff that a fork will stand upright in it" is the hinge. Add flour gradually until a fork pushed into the centre stays put without leaning — roughly the texture of a very thick choux paste. Only then stir in the beer, which slackens it slightly back to a droppable consistency.
- Imperial measuresThree-quarters of an imperial pint of sour cream is 15 fl oz, about 1¾ US cups; the quarter pint of beer is 5 fl oz, a scant ⅔ cup. Expect somewhere around 2½ to 3 cups of flour, but go by the fork rather than a number.
- Sour creamVictorian sour cream would have been cream left to sour naturally, and was probably looser and sharper than modern cultured sour cream. Commercial full-fat sour cream works, though you may want to thin it with a spoonful or two of milk before adding flour.
- The beerUse a plain, lightly hopped ale or lager. The carbonation lightens the batter (and in the original, live yeast in unfiltered beer would have helped too), so mix it in last and fry promptly rather than letting the bowl stand.
- Cardamom"A few cardamom-seeds" means the black seeds shelled out of green pods, not the whole pods. Crush the seeds from three or four pods in a mortar; ground cardamom from a jar is acceptable but fades fast, so use a scant ¼ teaspoon.
- Frying fat and temperatureHalf a pound of butter in a sauté pan is a shallow fry, and whole butter will brown and smoke before the fritters cook through. Clarified butter, ghee or a neutral oil at 350–360F is the practical choice; the recipe's own note about clarifying and reusing the fat points the same way.
- "Lightly set" is not doneFour to five minutes suits walnut-sized spoonfuls turned once. Anything larger will colour outside while the centre stays raw batter — keep them small and break one open to check before frying the rest.
- Blotting-paperKitchen paper on a rack. Sift the icing sugar over them while still hot so it clings.
- YieldAs stated, five or six people — about two dozen small fritters. They are best within minutes of frying and do not reheat well.
Fritters of this type — a stiff egg-and-cream batter dropped from a spoon into hot fat and buried in sugar — belong to a wider family of German and Austrian fried sweets that go under the name of snowballs, and the cardamom and beer in the batter suggest a Northern European rather than an English model, though the recipe itself names no source. Beer in a sweet batter looks odd now, but before chemical raising agents were universal ale and barm were used as lighteners: the dissolved gas and live yeast gave lift that eggs alone could not. The instruction to clarify and reuse the frying fat "again and again" is worth noticing too, since half a pound of butter was a real expense in a Victorian household.