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Batters and Fritters
Batter I 1 cup bread flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 eggs Few grains pepper 2/3 cup milk Mix flour, salt, and pepper. Add milk gradually, and eggs well beaten.
A plain coating batter of the kind old cookbooks numbered rather than named, meant for dipping vegetables, fruit, cooked meat or fish before deep frying. It comes together in a minute; the only real skill is in the frying.
- Ingredients at a glance1 cup bread flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt, a few grains of pepper, 2 eggs, 2/3 cup milk. The proportions give a fairly thick, spoon-coating batter rather than a thin, tempura-style one.
- Bread flour is meant literallyIn this period "bread flour" meant strong wheat flour as distinct from soft pastry flour. Modern bread flour works and gives a sturdy, chewy coating; all-purpose gives a slightly more tender crust and is the better choice for delicate items such as fish or fruit.
- The hinge: mix minimallyAdd the milk gradually to the dry ingredients to avoid lumps, then fold in the beaten eggs and stop. With a high-gluten flour, extended beating develops toughness, and the batter tightens on the food instead of puffing.
- Rest itFifteen to twenty minutes standing lets the flour hydrate fully and relaxes whatever gluten you did develop. The batter thickens as it sits; loosen with a spoonful of milk if it will no longer flow off the spoon in a ribbon.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe stops at mixing and says nothing about the fat. Period books judged frying fat by the point where a cube of bread browns in about a minute, which corresponds to roughly 365-375F. Below that the coating soaks fat; above it, the outside colours before the inside sets.
- Dry the food firstBatter will slide off anything wet. Pat vegetables, fruit or cooked meat dry and give them a light dusting of flour before dipping.
- YieldEnough batter to coat roughly a pound of prepared food, or two to four servings depending on what is being fried.
- Savoury or sweetThe pepper marks this as the savoury version. For apple, banana or other fruit fritters, leave the pepper out and add a tablespoon of sugar; do not add more, as sugar browns fast in hot fat.
Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks, particularly those written for cooking schools and domestic-science classes, often taught batters as a small set of numbered formulas rather than as individual dishes. The student learned proportions once and then applied them to whatever came to hand — oysters, salsify, cauliflower, cold roast meat, apples. That habit of teaching ratios rather than finished dishes is associated with the Boston Cooking School tradition and its many imitators. Fritters themselves are far older: the word descends through Old French friture from Latin frigere, to fry, and battered fried morsels appear in English recipe collections from the medieval period onward, long before anyone thought to number the batter.