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Beef Fritters
Scrape 1 pound of meat from a piece of cold roast beef, and season it with pepper and salt. Have ready a batter made with 3/4 pound of flour and about 1/2 pint of water. Blend these two well together, and stir in a piece of butter about the size of an egg, which has been melted before the fire. Whisk the whites of 2 eggs, and add them to the batter with the scraped meat. Stir well, and drop only a small quantity at a time into the pan, when the lard or dripping is boiling. Turn, that both sides may be brown. From eight to ten minutes will be sufficient to cook them over a steady fire. Dry, and send to table on a napkin. Sufficient for two persons.
A Victorian way of stretching Sunday's roast into a second meal. The method is sound, but the flour-to-water ratio as printed gives something closer to a dough than a batter.
- The batter ratioThree-quarters of a pound of flour is roughly 3 cups, against 1/2 pint of water (10 fl oz if the measure is imperial, 8 if American). Either way it is very stiff to drop from a spoon; add water gradually until it is the consistency of thick pancake batter, which may take a good deal more liquid than stated.
- Scraped meatScraping means dragging a knife blade across the cut surface of the cold roast so the meat shreds away and the gristle and sinew stay behind. A quick pulse in a food processor is not the same thing and gives a pasty texture; hand-shredding is closer.
- Butter"Size of an egg" is about 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Melt it and let it cool slightly before it goes into the batter so it disperses rather than seizing.
- The whitesWhisk them to soft peaks and fold in last, after the meat, with as few strokes as will combine them. This is the only lift in the batter, and stirring it well as instructed will knock most of it out.
- Frying fat and temperatureLard or beef dripping at 350-375F. 'Boiling' fat here is likely to mean hot enough to bubble around what is dropped in rather than literally boiling; fat that is actually smoking is too hot and the outside will colour before the centre sets.
- TimingEight to ten minutes suits a spoonful in shallow fat over the steady fire the recipe calls for. Small fritters in a modern pan brown in 3 to 4 minutes a side. Judge by colour and by the batter no longer being raw at the centre, not by the clock.
- Draining and serving"Dry" means drain on paper. Sending them up on a folded napkin was the standard presentation for anything fried, the linen absorbing residual grease at the table.
- YieldA pound of beef with three cups of flour will feed four generously, not the two the original claims, unless the fritters are being served as a single large dish with nothing else.
Fritters of this kind belong to the Victorian economy of the cold joint: a large roast was served hot once, cold in slices the next day, and then reappeared minced, hashed, potted or battered until it was gone. Scraping rather than chopping left the tough connective tissue behind on the knife and gave a tender result without a mincing machine. The instruction to send the fritters to table on a napkin is a small piece of period service etiquette, found across English cookery books of the second half of the nineteenth century for fried dishes such as whitebait.