Home › The Principles of Cookery › Spinach Fritters
Spinach Fritters
Take spinach and boil it thoroughly, drain it well, mince, and add some grated bread, nutmeg, ginger, and cinnamon, all pounded. Add as much cream or yolks and whites of eggs as will make the preparation of the consistency of batter; scald a few currants, and mix them in. Drop the batter into a frying-pan on boiling lard; when the fritters rise, take them out, drain, and send them to table.
A late-medieval style sweet-spiced spinach fritter, given without quantities in the manner of the older receipts Cassell's reprinted alongside its own. The proportions are yours to judge, and the drying of the spinach is what decides whether it works.
- Dry the spinach hardThis is the hinge. After boiling, drain, cool, then wring the spinach in a towel until no more liquid comes out. Wet spinach thins the batter, and thin batter spits and disintegrates in hot fat.
- Workable proportionsFor about 1 lb raw spinach (roughly 6 oz cooked and squeezed), start with 2 oz fine dry breadcrumbs and 2 eggs, adding crumbs until the mixture just holds its shape on a spoon. Cream alone gives a softer, more fragile fritter than eggs.
- "Grated bread"Crumbs grated from a stale loaf, drier than fresh crumbs. Dry your own in a low oven if you want the same absorbency; panko is coarser and binds less well.
- The spicesNutmeg, ginger and cinnamon "all pounded" indicates whole spices ground in a mortar. About a quarter teaspoon of each is enough for the quantity above; with the currants and sweet spices this reads as a sweet dish rather than a savoury one, though the recipe itself calls for no sugar.
- Scalding the currantsPouring boiling water over dried currants and standing them a few minutes plumps them and washes off dust and stalk fragments. Drain and pat dry before mixing in, or they reintroduce the moisture you just removed.
- Frying temperature"Boiling lard" is fat at the point where a crumb sizzles briskly, in modern terms somewhere around 350-360F. Any hotter and the outside colours before the egg sets; any cooler and the fritters drink fat. Any neutral frying fat will serve in place of lard.
- When they are doneThey float and turn a deep green-brown in roughly 3-4 minutes, turned once. Drain on paper rather than a cloth, and dust with sugar before serving if you want the sweetness the spices imply.
- YieldAbout 16 to 18 small fritters from the quantities above, enough for four as a side dish or a sweet course. They must be eaten within minutes of leaving the pan.
Sweetened, spiced vegetable fritters like this one belong to an older English cooking tradition in which the line between savoury and sweet was drawn very differently: spinach turns up in Tudor and Stuart tarts with sugar, currants and cinnamon, and the combination survived in printed cookery long after fashionable dining had separated the two. Cassell's, compiled in the 1870s and reissued for decades afterwards, seems to have worked partly by absorbing receipts from earlier books, which may be why a page in a Victorian dictionary of cookery can read as though it were written two centuries before, with no weights and the instruction to add "as much cream or yolks and whites of eggs as will make" a batter. Nutmeg, ginger and cinnamon are often described as the characteristic sweet-spice grouping of English kitchens from the medieval period onward, and currants, imported dried from the Greek islands, are generally said to have been among the cheapest and most widely used of dried fruits in British cooking.