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French Fritters
One quart of milk (half to be boiled, and the other half mixed with a quart of flour, and used to thicken the boiling milk with).
Let it get done. While cooking, beat ten eggs very light; add a spoonful at a time to the batter, beating all the time, till well mixed. Add salt to your taste. Have a small oven full of nice lard, boiling hot. Put not quite a spoonful of batter to each fritter. Take them out before they turn dark and put them in a colander to drain the lard off of them.--Mrs. Dr. E. FRITTERS (made with yeast).
One quart flour, three tablespoonfuls yeast, five eggs, one pint milk. Beat into a tolerably stiff batter. Stir a cupful of boiled rice into the batter, a short time before baking. A good deal of lard (boiling hot) is required for frying the fritters. Drop the batter in with a spoon, which must be dipped, each time, in boiling water. In cool weather, make the fritters about nine in the morning, in the summer, about eleven.--Mrs. A. C.
Two fritters from two contributors: the first is a choux-type paste cooked on the stove and enriched with eggs, the second a yeast-risen rice batter. Both are deep-fried, and both assume a cook who judges fat by eye.
- The hinge: cook the paste dryThe first fritter is a close relative of pate a choux, a flour paste cooked on the stove and then loosened with egg (here made with milk and without butter). The thickened milk-and-flour paste must be stirred over heat until it pulls away from the pan and stops smelling of raw flour before any egg goes in, or the fritters will collapse in the fat. "Let it get done" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
- Cool before the eggsTen eggs added a spoonful at a time to a scalding paste will scramble. Let the paste cool to warm, then beat the egg in gradually. Ten eggs to a quart of flour is a generous ratio; add the last two or three only until the paste falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume: a quart is 4 cups, roughly 17-18 oz unsifted. The full quantity here makes a very large batch, perhaps 60 to 70 small fritters. Quartering the first recipe gives a manageable amount.
- "A small oven full of lard"The oven here is a Dutch oven or deep iron pot, not the baking oven. Use 2 to 3 inches of fat in a heavy pot at 350-365F. "Boiling hot" lard is a visual judgement; a thermometer removes the guesswork, and the fritters need a moderate temperature so the centres set before the outsides colour.
- Three tablespoonfuls of yeastThis means liquid yeast, a homemade barm or a poured-off ale yeast, not granules. Substitute about 2 teaspoons of active dry yeast or one packet, dissolved in a little of the warmed milk.
- Why nine in the morningThe times given are rising times for a kitchen with no thermostat: a cool room needs the extra hours, a summer kitchen fewer. Judge by the batter, which should be visibly puffed and bubbling, and reckon roughly two hours at modern room temperature.
- The dipped spoonDipping the spoon in boiling water between fritters keeps the sticky yeast batter from clinging. It still works, and is faster than oiling the spoon.
- RiceThe cupful of boiled rice should be cold, cooked plain and soft, and folded in at the last so the grains stay whole. Stirred in early it breaks down and the batter goes heavy.
- Draining and servingA colander lined with paper is kinder than the bare colander. The recipe gives no serving direction; sugar, syrup, molasses or a wine sauce would all suit, and the yeast-and-rice version also takes a savoury turn with more salt and no sugar.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, is a contributor cookbook: recipes were gathered from named Virginia housewives, which is why these two appear stacked together and signed "Mrs. Dr. E." and "Mrs. A. C." rather than reconciled into one method. The first rests on a cooked flour-and-egg paste of the kind French cookery had standardised as pâte à choux. The second belongs to an older and more local tradition: leftover boiled rice stirred into a risen batter, a thrifty habit throughout the rice-growing South, and one that survives in the calas of New Orleans, which were also raised with yeast and sold in the street by the morning. The instruction to mix at nine in winter and eleven in summer is the clearest reminder of when this was written, in a house where the only proofing box was the kitchen itself.