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Pineapple Fritters
See Apple Fritters. If the chopped fruit is preferred use one cupful to the quantity of batter given.
This is a cross-reference entry rather than a standalone method: the batter and frying directions live under Apple Fritters, and all this page changes is the fruit. A few things worth knowing before you go looking for that batter.
- The missing half of the recipeNothing here tells you the batter proportions, so the instruction "one cupful to the quantity of batter given" is meaningless on its own; you have to turn to the Apple Fritters entry to find out what quantity of batter is meant.
- Slices or choppedThe original only contrasts chopped fruit with whatever form the Apple Fritters method uses, presumably slices, and offers chopping as the alternative. Either way the fruit wants blotting or draining well, since loose juice thins the batter and makes it spread in the fat.
- Fresh versus cannedCanned pineapple was widely available by the turn of the century, while fresh remained comparatively expensive. Either works. Fresh needs the core cut out and the slices are firmer, so give them an extra minute; canned fruit is already soft and sweet, so sugar in the batter can be reduced.
- Fat temperatureThis page gives no frying directions at all; they sit under Apple Fritters. In practice fritters want fat around 365-375F: below that they absorb grease and stay pale, much above and the outside colours before the batter sets around the fruit. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- Draining and finishingLift onto crumpled paper or a rack, not a flat plate, or the underside steams. Dust with powdered sugar while still hot; a squeeze of lemon over pineapple fritters cuts the sweetness.
- YieldSince the batter quantity is not given here, no yield can be worked out from this page alone. Fritters do not keep and should go to the table within minutes of frying.
Fritters were one of the most useful things a nineteenth-century cook could do with fruit, since a single batter served apples, bananas, peaches, oranges and pineapple in turn, and the recipe books of the period reflect that by writing the method once and cross-referencing everything else to it -- which is exactly what happens on this page. Pineapple's presence alongside the more familiar fruits says something about how far the trade had come by this date. The word fritter itself is generally traced through Old French friture to Late Latin frictura, from the verb meaning to fry, and the technique of coating fruit in batter for the fat is far older than any of the fruits listed alongside it here.