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Apple Fritters II
2 medium-sized sour apples Batter IV Prepare and cook as Apple Fritters I.
This is a variant entry: it gives only the fruit and points you to the book's numbered batter and to the first apple fritter recipe for method. The notes below cover what the shorthand assumes.
- Two cross-referencesYou need Batter IV and Apple Fritters I from elsewhere in the book before this entry is usable. The batter numbers in these manuals differ from one another, so use this book's own batter rather than a batter from another source.
- "Sour apples"This means a tart cooking apple, not one that has gone off. Granny Smith, Bramley, Northern Spy or any firm acid apple works; sweet dessert apples turn flabby and taste flat inside a fried batter.
- CuttingApple Fritters I supplies the cutting, which this entry omits. Cored rings cut crosswise, roughly a quarter-inch thick, are the usual treatment, so that batter and fruit finish together; thicker pieces can leave the centre underdone.
- Fat temperatureThe entry names no temperature. By modern practice, deep fry at roughly 365-375F: cooler and the batter absorbs fat and slumps, hotter and the coating colours before the apple softens. Fry in small batches so the fat does not drop in temperature.
- YieldTwo medium apples give roughly 10 to 14 rings, enough for three or four people as a course or a sweet.
- ServingDrain on paper, then dust with sugar or a little cinnamon sugar while still hot. They collapse as they cool and do not reheat well, so serve straight from the pan.
Fried batter-coated fruit is long established in English and American cookery, and apple fritters appear in household books on both sides of the Atlantic well before the nineteenth century. Some cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries broke such dishes into numbered component recipes -- a set of standard batters and doughs, cross-referenced from the dishes that used them -- so that one batter could be applied to apples, bananas, oysters or corn in turn. This terse entry appears to belong to that pattern: the fruit and the batter number are all the reader is given, because the method has been set out elsewhere. The call for a sour apple points to a tart cooking variety that holds its shape and cuts the richness of the frying fat.