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Queen Fritters
1/4 cup butter (scant) 1/2 cup boiling water 1/2 cup flour 2 eggs Fruit preserve or marmalade Put butter in small saucepan and pour on water. As soon as water again reaches boiling-point, add flour all at once and stir until mixture leaves sides of saucepan, cleaving to spoon. Remove from fire and add eggs unbeaten, one at a time, beating mixture thoroughly between addition of eggs. Drop by spoonfuls and fry in deep fat until well puffed and browned. Drain, make an opening, and fill with preserve or marmalade. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and serve on a folded napkin.
This is a plain choux paste — pâte à choux — fried rather than baked, then split and filled. The paste is straightforward; the frying is where it goes wrong.
- Fat temperatureFry at 350–360F. Hotter and the outside colours before the interior sets, so the fritters collapse when they cool; cooler and they soak fat instead of puffing. A thermometer is worth more here than any visual cue.
- Give them room and timeThe paste roughly triples. Fry a few spoonfuls at a time and allow 5–8 minutes, turning them as they roll over. They should feel light and sound hollow before they come out.
- Dry the paste properlyStir over the heat until a film forms on the pan bottom and the mass balls up on the spoon. Paste that is still wet will not hold the eggs and the fritters stay dense.
- Eggs one at a timeLet the paste cool for a minute or two before the first egg goes in, or it will scramble. Beat each egg in completely; the paste will look slippery and broken at first and then come back together.
- Egg sizeEggs of this period ran smaller than a modern large egg. Two large eggs into a half cup of flour may give a paste too loose to hold its shape — it should drop reluctantly from the spoon, not run. Hold back part of the second egg if it looks slack.
- Deep fatThe original says only 'deep fat', which would most likely have meant lard or another rendered fat, though vegetable shortenings were also available. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point does the same job. Use at least 2 inches in a deep pan, and never more than half full.
- Filling and yieldFill only after the fritters have cooled slightly, or the preserve runs straight out. Expect 12–16 small fritters, enough for four. They are at their best within the hour and do not reheat well.
Fried choux paste under the name beignets soufflés was a standard of nineteenth-century French pastry work, and English and American cookbooks took it up with a range of prettier names, queen fritters and puff fritters among them. The appeal was theatrical: a spoonful of stiff paste swells to several times its size in the fat, hollow inside and ready for jam. The finishing touch of powdered sugar and a folded napkin was standard service in this period.