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Fritters (No. 1)
3 eggs (beaten separately) 3 cups Five Roses flour 2 cups sour milk or buttermilk 1 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon salt.
Dissolve the soda in the milk, stir in the egg yolks, then the sifted flour and salt, lastly the whites beaten stiff. Have kettle of boiling fat ready, drop the batter in by spoonfuls, and cook the fritters to a light brown.
Note-Sliced bananas or chopped apples can be added, if desired.
Fat in which fritters are fried should be very deep and boiling hot. When done, remove like doughnuts and drain from grease. Transfer to hot platter covered with folded napkin and serve at once.
A plain drop-batter fritter leavened with soda and sour milk, thickened enough to hold its shape in fat. The batter is the whole trick: too thin and it spreads and soaks grease, too thick and the centres stay raw.
- Fat temperature"Boiling hot" fat is not literally boiling — fat does not boil, it smokes and then burns. Aim for 365–375F on a thermometer; a scrap of batter should rise and colour in about a minute. Below 350F the fritters absorb fat, above 390F the outsides brown before the middles set.
- Five Roses flourFive Roses was the Lake of the Woods Milling Company's household flour, milled from Canadian hard spring wheat and sold for general use; ordinary all-purpose flour is the closest modern equivalent. A modern bread flour will make the fritters chewier than intended.
- Sour milkPeriod sour milk was raw milk clabbered at room temperature, which is not what happens to pasteurised milk today. Buttermilk is the correct modern stand-in, or use milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar per cup, left to stand ten minutes.
- The sodaOne teaspoon to two cups of buttermilk is about right for the acid present. Dissolve it in the milk and get the batter into the fat reasonably promptly — the lift is chemical and starts immediately, and a batter left standing half an hour fries flat.
- Beaten whites"Eggs beaten separately" means yolks stirred in and whites whipped to stiff peaks and folded in last. Fold, do not stir, or you lose the aeration that keeps these light against a fairly heavy soda batter.
- Batter consistencyThree cups of flour to two cups of milk gives a thick drop batter that mounds on the spoon. If it slumps and runs, add flour by the spoonful; fruit will loosen it further, so add the apples or bananas before judging.
- Fruit additionsChop apples fine — quarter-inch dice or smaller — so they cook through in the two to three minutes the batter needs. Banana slices should be firm rather than soft-ripe or they dissolve into the batter.
- Draining and servingA wire rack set over a tray drains better than the folded napkin, which traps steam and softens the crust. Serve immediately; the recipe itself specifies no accompaniment beyond the hot platter and napkin.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; this quantity of batter will make several dozen tablespoon-sized fritters. Fry in small batches; crowding drops the fat temperature sharply.
Fritters of this kind — a soda-and-sour-milk batter dropped into deep fat — sat squarely in the doughnut family in North American cookery. They belonged to a dairy household: sour milk and buttermilk were the unavoidable byproducts of keeping a cow or churning butter at home, and cooks were expected to have a use for them, which pairing them with baking soda supplied. The book itself was promotional literature for the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, compiled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives in the 1910s, and its recipes carry the terseness of contributors writing for readers who already knew what a kettle of fat looked like and how hot it should be. The note about bananas is a small period marker — imported fruit had become cheap and common enough by then to be treated as an offhand variation rather than a luxury.