Fritter Beans
1 egg 3/4 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons milk 1/2 cup flour Beat egg until light, add milk, salt, and flour. Put through colander or pastry tube into deep fat, and fry until brown; drain on brown paper.
A soup garnish rather than a dish in itself: a stiff egg batter dropped through holes into hot fat, producing crisp pea-sized nuggets to scatter over clear soups just before serving. The whole thing takes about ten minutes once the fat is up to heat.
- Fat temperature is the hingeAim for 375F. Below about 350F the droplets soak fat and collapse into greasy lumps; above 400F they colour before the centres set. A thermometer is worth using here because the pieces are too small to judge by eye.
- Batter consistencyOne egg, 2 tablespoons milk and 1/2 cup flour gives a thick, slow-dropping batter, not a pourable one. If it will not move through the colander, add milk half a teaspoon at a time; if the droplets flatten and spread in the fat, work in another spoonful of flour.
- The colanderUse a metal colander with round holes roughly 1/4 inch across and push the batter through with a spoon or spatula directly over the pan, held six to eight inches above the fat. A piping bag with a small plain tip works as well; snip the beans off with scissors as they emerge.
- Work in batchesThey cook in 30 to 60 seconds and want room to move. Crowding drops the fat temperature and welds the pieces together. Lift them out with a spider or fine skimmer as soon as they are an even golden brown.
- DrainingBrown paper here means plain unbleached wrapping or bag paper. Use paper towel or a rack set over a tray; a rack keeps the undersides crisp where paper steams them slightly.
- SaltThree-quarters of a teaspoon in this small quantity is assertive, which suits a garnish scattered on a lightly seasoned clear soup. If the soup it is going into is already well seasoned, cut it to half a teaspoon.
- Yield and servingAbout a cup of beans, enough to garnish six to eight bowls. Add them at the table or the last moment before serving; they soften within a minute or two in hot liquid. Made ahead, they keep a day in a tin and can be recrisped in a 350F oven for a few minutes.
Fritter beans belong to the large family of fried garnishes that turn-of-the-century cookery treated as essential to a properly served soup, alongside custard royale, marrow balls, profiteroles and diced fried bread. A clear consomme was admired for being clear, which left it visually and texturally bare, and the garnish supplied the contrast. The name is descriptive: bean-sized nubs of fritter batter. The colander trick is the same one used for German Spatzle and for Indian boondi, batter forced through perforations into a hot medium so it sets in droplets, and it needs no special equipment beyond what a kitchen already had.