Home › Introductory Recipes › Batter for Fruit Fritters
Batter for Fruit Fritters
To one cup of flour add a good pinch of salt and a half teaspoon of baking powder, then sift. Into the middle of this stir two beaten eggs and a half cup each of milk and sugar, then beat well. One egg only may be used, in which case add a half teaspoon of baking powder.
A plain coating batter from the front of the book, meant to be used with whatever fruit the later recipes call for. The only real decisions it leaves you are frying temperature and how sweet you want the shell.
- The hinge: fry at 365-375FWith a half cup of sugar in the batter, the outside browns well before the fruit inside heats through if the fat is any hotter. Keep a thermometer in the oil and let it recover between batches.
- The sugar is optional, and highThe sugar is high -- A half cup of sugar to one cup of flour gives a sweet, quick-browning crust. Two tablespoons gives a batter that fries more evenly and lets the fruit taste like itself; the difference is only in the shell. Note that the recipe itself treats the sugar as a fixed ingredient, not as a choice.
- The baking powder instructionRead it as cumulative: a half teaspoon in the sifted flour, plus another half teaspoon when you use one egg instead of two, so a full teaspoon in the one-egg version. The second egg is doing part of the lifting in the first.
- Consistency to look forOne cup flour against two eggs, a half cup of milk and a half cup of sugar makes a thin, pourable batter rather than a thick one. Beat it smooth and dip the fruit straight from it.
- Mixing orderSifting first, then stirring the liquids into a well in the centre, is the right sequence and worth following. Beat only until smooth; long beating after the flour is wet toughens the crust.
- Rest or use at onceChemical leavening starts working as soon as it is wet, so this batter is best used within twenty minutes or so. It is not a beer batter that improves with standing.
- Dry the fruitPat fruit slices dry and dust them lightly with flour before dipping. Wet or syrupy fruit sheds the batter in the fat, which is the usual reason fritters come out bald on one side.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; roughly a cup and a half of batter, enough for a modest dish of fritters. Drain on a rack rather than paper so the underside stays crisp, and dust with sugar just before serving.
Fritters are among the oldest fried sweets in English cookery, and the word comes through Old French friture, from Latin frigere, to fry. Apple fritters in particular are often said to have been associated with Lent and Shrove Tuesday, when frying batter used up eggs and fat before the fast, though that use-up tradition is most securely attached to pancakes. What dates this version is the baking powder: earlier fritter batters were raised with ale or yeast, or with whites whipped separately and folded in, and it is only from the later nineteenth century that a commercial chemical leavener becomes the ordinary household choice.