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Old-Fashioned Rhubarb Fritters
Beat together 2 eggs, add 1 cupful of milk.
Mix together 3 cupfuls of flour, 1 tablespoonful of sugar, ½ teaspoonful of salt, and 2 teaspoonfuls of baking-powder. Stir into this the egg mixture, 1 pint of chopped rhubarb, 1 tablespoonful of melted butter and more milk, if necessary, to make a thick drop batter. Fry in small thick cakes in a frying-pan, turning when one side is nicely browned. Serve with butter and grated maple sugar.
A griddle-cake batter rather than a true deep-fried fritter, and the wording assumes a cook who knows what a drop batter should look like. A few notes make it behave.
- Rhubarb stalks onlyUse the stalks, chopped small, about 1/4-inch dice; a pint is roughly 8-12 oz, or three to four medium stalks. Discard the leaves entirely, which contain oxalic acid in quantities that make them inedible.
- The batter's hingeThree cups of flour to one cup of milk and two eggs is very stiff, and the recipe itself allows for more milk; the rhubarb will also give up some juice as it stands. Add extra milk a spoonful at a time only until the batter drops reluctantly from a spoon, and mix it no more than necessary.
- SugarOne tablespoon sweetens almost nothing against a pint of raw rhubarb. The maple sugar at the end is doing the real work, and modern tastes may prefer 3-4 tablespoons in the batter as well unless the fritters are going alongside something savoury.
- "Fry in a frying-pan"This means shallow frying in butter or lard over medium heat, not deep fat. Keep the cakes to about three inches and no more than half an inch thick, so the centre sets before the outside darkens; expect roughly three to five minutes a side, going by colour as the recipe directs.
- Testing for donenessRaw rhubarb keeps the interior wet and can read as underdone batter. Split one open before frying the rest; the crumb should be set and the fruit soft, not crunchy.
- Grated maple sugarHard cakes of maple sugar were grated like cheese over hot food. Crumbled maple sugar, maple flakes, or a pour of maple syrup all serve; brown sugar is the ordinary substitute.
- YieldAbout 16 to 18 cakes, enough for six as a dessert or four at breakfast. They are best straight from the pan and go leaden if held.
Rhubarb was a thrift crop before it was a dessert fruit: a hardy perennial that came up in the dooryard year after year without replanting or purchase. It arrived in April and May, before any other garden fruit, and in American usage it went by the old name pieplant, after its principal use. Turning it into a griddle batter rather than a pie stretched it further still, since a pint of chopped stalk feeds far more people bound into flour than it does baked between crusts. The maple sugar finish suggests the northern states and Canada, where maple was a household sweetener a family could make rather than buy, and where the sugaring season and the first rhubarb fall only a few weeks apart.