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Cauliflower Fritters
Use any left-over pieces of boiled cauliflower.
The outside green leaves if cut in pieces and cooked until tender may also be used. Mix together 2 well-beaten eggs, ½ cupful of milk, ½ teaspoonful of salt, a dash of pepper, 1 tablespoonful of melted butter or dripping, and sufficient flour to make a drop batter. Have ready a deep kettle partly filled with smoking hot fat.
Dip each piece of cauliflower into the batter, drop into the hot fat and cook until golden brown.
A thrift recipe built around leftovers, so the quantities of vegetable are deliberately open. The batter is the fixed part; everything else adjusts to what is in the bowl.
- Dry the cauliflower firstBoiled florets hold a surprising amount of water, and wet surfaces shed batter into the fat. Blot the pieces on a towel and let them come to room temperature before dipping.
- "Drop batter"A batter thick enough to fall from the spoon in a lump rather than pour in a stream. With 2 eggs and half a cup of milk that lands around 3/4 to 1 cup of flour, but add it gradually and judge by the spoon.
- Fat temperature"Smoking hot" is older language for fat at frying heat, not literally smoking, which means it has broken down. Aim for 365-375F; below that the batter absorbs grease, above it the coating colours before the inside sets.
- Depth of fatA deep kettle should be no more than a third to half full, since the batter foams up sharply when it hits the oil. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- DrippingRendered beef or pork fat, saved from roasting. It is used here for the melted-fat tablespoon in the batter, and butter substitutes directly; the frying fat can be any neutral oil with a high smoke point.
- The green leavesThe outer leaves are genuinely good, but they need to be boiled until fully tender first, and the thick central ribs should be cut away or sliced thin. Underdone leaf stays tough inside the batter.
- FinishingDrain on paper, salt while still hot, and serve at once. Fritters go limp within a few minutes of leaving the fat.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. The batter as given would coat something like one medium head's worth of cooked florets, enough for three or four as a side.
Fritters were the standard nineteenth- and early twentieth-century answer to the problem of yesterday's vegetables: a batter, a kettle of fat, and cold boiled anything becomes a hot dish again. This recipe belongs to the low-cost cookery literature in which household writers made the point that the outer leaves of a cauliflower, usually thrown away, are edible and worth cooking. Deep fat was commonly saved, strained and reused rather than discarded. The technique is older than the book: batter-coated frying runs back through English cookery for centuries, and the word fritter comes by way of Old French from the Latin frigere, to fry.