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Strawberry Fritters
Put some crushed strawberries, sweetened and flavoured to taste, between two thin strips of spongecake, moistened with Madeira. Coat them with a batter made of flour, egg, and milk, and fry them in hot lard. Dust with sugar, and serve hot.
A fried sponge-cake sandwich with a crushed-strawberry filling — essentially a sweet croque built for the deep pan. The batter seal is the whole trick.
- Seal the edgesCrushed fruit will bleed into hot fat the moment the coating splits. Press the sponge strips firmly together, chill the assembled sandwiches for 20–30 minutes so the filling firms, then dip so the batter closes right around the cut edges.
- Batter proportionsThe original gives none. A workable coating batter is about 1 cup (125 g) flour, 1 egg and 3/4 cup (180 ml) milk, whisked to the consistency of heavy cream — thick enough to cling in an even layer, not so thick it goes doughy inside.
- Sponge cakeUse a firm, close-grained sponge or a plain pound cake, cut in strips roughly 1/4 in (6 mm) thick. Airy modern angel food or a very light génoise collapses under wet fruit.
- Madeira, and how muchMoisten, do not soak: a teaspoon or so brushed over each strip. Any medium-dry fortified wine (Madeira, sherry, marsala) works; some of the alcohol cooks off in the fat, though a brief fry will not drive off all of it.
- Frying fat and temperatureLard is authentic and gives a clean fry; any neutral oil with a high smoke point does the same job. Hold the fat at 350–360°F (175–180°C) — hot enough to set the batter in seconds, cool enough that the cake heats through without scorching. About 1 to 1 1/2 minutes a side.
- Sweetening the fruitMacerate the crushed berries with sugar for 15 minutes, then drain off the syrup that pools. Wet filling is what bursts the batter; the drained syrup is worth serving alongside.
- Yield and servingThe quantities scale to whatever cake you have; figure two fritters per person. They must go to the table straight from the pan — sponge fried and then left to stand turns leathery. Dust with caster or icing sugar at the last moment.
By the late nineteenth century a fritter was understood as a method, not a dish, and compilers ran through the variations — apple, rice, cake, jam — as applications of one batter. Fritters of sweetened bread or cake were a standing way to use up staleness, and Madeira-moistened sponge turns up often in Victorian sweets because fortified wine both flavoured and softened cake that had gone dry. Strawberries, meanwhile, were still emphatically seasonal in Britain when the Dictionary was compiled; a recipe like this belongs to a few weeks of high summer, when the fruit was cheap enough to crush.