Bacon Fritters
Bacon fritters make a savory side dish for luncheon. Cut quite fine 6 slices of cold fried bacon and mix with 1 tablespoonful of grated onion. Cut the crust from 1/2 loaf of stale bread, soak for a few minutes in cold water, squeeze dry and crumble quite fine, mixing it with the fine crumbled inner portion. Season highly with salt, pepper and a pinch of powdered thyme, add 4 tablespoonfuls of melted suet or dripping and mold into small flat cakes, flouring them well.
Fry in a pan in a little hot dripping.
A frugal bread-and-bacon cake rather than a batter fritter. The whole dish turns on how dry you get the bread.
- Squeeze the bread hardWet crumb is the reason these cakes fall apart in the pan. After soaking, wring the bread in your hands or in a clean towel until no more water comes out, then rake it apart with a fork so it is fluffy, not pasted.
- How much bread"Half a loaf" is vague. Take it as roughly 8 oz of stale bread, crust and crumb together, which will give several cups once crumbled. The recipe reads as though the crust is what is soaked, because it is hard; the inner crumb is simply broken up dry.
- Suet and drippingBeef suet is a butcher's order today. Bacon fat saved from the pan is the closest substitute and reinforces the flavour; lard also works. The 4 tablespoons are the binder as much as the fat, so do not cut them back.
- No egg in the originalThe mixture holds together on fat and pressure alone, so pack the cakes firmly and flour them generously, as directed. One beaten egg is a reasonable modern insurance policy if your bread was soft to begin with.
- Grated onionGrate it and include the juice. Grated onion softens in the short frying time in a way that coarsely chopped onion may not, and can taste sharp if left in large pieces.
- FryingMedium heat. The recipe gives no timing; fry until well browned on each side, a few minutes a side. Too hot and the outside browns before the interior is heated through; too cool and the cakes drink fat.
- Season boldly"Season highly" is meant literally. Bread absorbs salt, and the only other flavourings are six slices of bacon and a pinch of thyme, so taste a pinch of the raw mixture before shaping.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. From this quantity expect roughly ten to twelve small flat cakes, enough for about four as a side dish.
Bacon fritters belong to the long tradition of bread-and-fat dishes that carried the flavour of a small amount of meat across a whole meal. Stale bread was not waste in a household of this period but a standing ingredient, and cookbooks of the low-cost sort often seem to have paired it with saved dripping, the jar of solidified pan fat that sat beside the stove. The word fritter here means only "something fried", arguably closer to a rissole or a faggot than to the sweet batter-dipped fritters of later cookery. Six slices of already-cooked bacon and half a loaf of bread go into the dish, and the appearance of thyme and grated onion shows the author expected such economy to taste of something rather than merely fill.