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Orange Fritters
Make a simple batter (See Introductory Recipes) and in this dip slices or sections of orange from which all peeling, and core have been removed. Fry at once in hot fat in a proper frying kettle and when brown drain, dust with powdered sugar, and serve.
A short recipe that assumes you already keep a batter formula and a deep kettle on hand. The two things it leaves unsaid — how dry the fruit must be and how hot the fat — decide whether this works.
- Dry the fruit firstOrange sections are full of juice and the membranes weep as soon as they are cut. Blot the pieces well on a towel before dipping, or the batter slides off in the fat and you get bare fruit in a pan of scorching sugar.
- "A simple batter"The recipe sends you to a batter formula printed elsewhere in the book, which is not reproduced here. A workable modern stand-in is about 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, a pinch of salt, 1 egg and enough milk (roughly 2/3 cup) to make it thick enough to coat a spoon and cling. Mix it just before frying; a batter that stands goes slack.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe says only "hot fat." In modern practice fritters are fried at about 365-375F. Cooler than that and the batter drinks oil and the fritters turn heavy; much hotter and the coating browns before the fruit inside heats through.
- The frying kettleA "proper frying kettle" is a deep, heavy pot with room for the fat to rise when food goes in — fill no more than a third. A Dutch oven works. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- Remove the core and pith"All peeling and core" most likely covers the white pith and the tough central column as well as the rind. Pith is bitter. Sections with the membrane peeled away fry best, though they are fragile.
- Powdered sugarDust while the fritters are still hot but after a minute of draining, so the sugar sticks without dissolving into syrup. Drain on a rack rather than paper if you want the undersides to stay crisp.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities; the number of fritters depends entirely on how much batter you mix and how many oranges you section. They collapse as they cool, so serve within a few minutes of frying.
Fruit fritters are one of the oldest uses of a frying batter in English cookery, and orange versions appear steadily in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American books. Collections organised by fruit, of the sort often said to have been common, gathered a range of treatments of a single item — juice, marmalade, salad, pudding, fritter — so a household with a crate of oranges could work through it. The brevity here is typical of the genre: batter and deep fat were assumed skills, kept in a general "introductory recipes" section and cross-referenced rather than repeated, which is why the fritter itself takes only three sentences.