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Pumpkin Fritters
Boil the pumpkin, then pour off the water. Let it get quite cold. Take a plate and press the pumpkin down, so as to squeeze out all watery particles still left.
Stir in 2 eggs and some Five Roses flour (well dried) to make a batter. From a spoonful of the batter you will have a fritter which must be baked in a pan with boiling fat. Let the pot not be too sparing, the deeper the pot you fry them in the less you use and the nicer the cake. Mix pounded cinnamon and sugar and serve with the cakes.
A spoon-dropped fritter with almost nothing in it but pumpkin, egg and flour, which means the batter succeeds or fails on how dry the pumpkin is. The original assumes a wood-stove kitchen and a cook who knows what a good frying fat looks like.
- Drain the pumpkin hardThis is the hinge. Boiled pumpkin holds a great deal of water, and the recipe's instruction to press it under a plate once cold is not optional garnish — wet purée forces you to add so much flour that the fritters turn heavy and pasty. Press it in a sieve or twist it in a clean cloth until no more liquid runs.
- Which pumpkinUse a dense cooking squash — sugar pumpkin, kabocha, butternut — rather than a jack-o'-lantern type, which is watery and bland. Canned solid-pack pumpkin (not pie filling, which is sweetened and spiced) works if you drain it the same way.
- "Well dried" flourPeriod recipes sometimes call for flour to be dried or warmed before use, flour being liable to take up damp in storage. Modern bagged flour needs no drying; measure normally.
- How much flourThe recipe gives none, deliberately, because it depends on the pumpkin. Start with about 1/2 cup flour to 1 cup pressed pumpkin and 2 eggs, and add more only until the batter holds its shape on the spoon. A pinch of salt and 1/2 teaspoon baking powder are period-appropriate and improve the texture.
- "Baked in a pan with boiling fat"This means deep fried, not oven baked; the recipe's own reference to "the deeper the pot you fry them in" settles it. Fat at 365-375F; the batter should sizzle at once and colour in two to three minutes a side.
- Depth of the potThe advice that a deeper pot uses less fat is sound. A narrow, deep pan needs a smaller total volume to reach frying depth, and fritters that float clear of the bottom come out less greasy. Fill no more than a third full.
- Serving and yieldAbout a dozen small fritters from a cup of pressed pumpkin. Drain on paper, then roll or dust while still hot so the cinnamon sugar sticks. They are at their best within a few minutes of frying.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and built largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives who used the company's flour, which is why the book's voice shifts so noticeably from page to page — this one, with its "Let the pot not be too sparing," reads like a contribution translated or half-remembered from another language rather than a house-style instruction. Pumpkin fritters of exactly this kind — boiled pumpkin, egg, a little flour, fried by the spoonful and finished with cinnamon sugar — belong to a very old and widely scattered family of dishes, appearing in Dutch, German and South African kitchens as well as North American ones, and it is tempting, though no more than a guess, to connect them to the fact that squash was abundant, cheap and stored well through winter.