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Apple Fritters with Lard & Apples
1 C flour 1 C milk 1/2 C sugar Pinch of salt Put flour in dish, then pour milk in, stirring constantly. Beat eggs together before putting in, and then thoroughly beat the batter. Add sugar and salt after the eggs have been added. Pare apples, cut in slices round and round, about ¼ inch thick. Dip slices in the batter and fry in deep lard like doughnuts.
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A plain drop-batter fritter of the sort that turned windfall apples into a hot bread for supper. The written ingredient list is short of its flour, milk and egg amounts, so treat the proportions below as guidance rather than transcription.
- Batter proportionsOnly the 1/2 cup sugar and a pinch of salt are given quantities here; the flour, milk and egg amounts are not stated. As a starting point, something like 1 1/2 cups flour, 3/4 cup milk and 2 eggs will give a coating batter, but this is a reconstruction, not the original recipe's proportions.
- Slice thickness"About 14 inch thick" is a lost fraction; a quarter inch is the working figure. Thicker rounds stay raw at the core in the time it takes the batter to brown.
- Cut round and roundCoring the apple whole and slicing crosswise gives the ring shape the recipe assumes. A firm tart apple holds together in the fat; a mealy one collapses.
- Frying fatThe recipe gives no temperature; "like doughnuts" is the only guide, meaning enough deep fat that the rings float and can be turned. In modern practice a moderately hot fat works best: too cool and they soak, too hot and the batter colours before the apple softens.
- SiftingMany cookbooks of this period assumed flour was sifted before measuring, and an unsifted cup can run appreciably heavier, giving a stiffer batter. This recipe says nothing either way.
- Yield and servingYield depends entirely on the unstated batter quantities. Drain on paper, dust with sugar or cinnamon sugar while hot, and eat straight away; fritters go leathery quickly.
Church and society cook books were financed by the advertising bound in among the recipes, and the pages were set so that the two ran together without much ceremony. Apple fritters themselves are far older than the book: batter-dipped fruit fried in deep fat appears in English cookery from the medieval period onward, and by the nineteenth century the apple version had settled into American household manuals as a way of using storage apples in late winter, when they had softened past eating out of hand.