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Onion Fritters
For this select as large green onions as possible, trim and cut them six inches long. Place in a saucepan, cover with equal quantities of hot milk and stock, add salt, pepper, I bay leaf, I blade of mace and 1 sprig of thyme and simmer for fifteen minutes or until barely tender. Drain and when cold dip each into a warm, thick white sauce made with 2 tablespoonfuls of flour to 1 cupful of milk, lay on a buttered platter and set aside until cold. Roll in finely-sifted bread crumbs, dip into slightly-beaten egg and roll again in the crumbs. Fry golden brown in deep, smoking hot fat. If desired, fritter batter may be used in place of the sauce and the crumbling omitted.
This is a croquette method applied to whole scallions: poach, coat in a stiff white sauce, chill until the sauce sets, then crumb and deep-fry. The chilling is the whole technique.
- Chill hard, twiceThe onions must be cold before they go into the sauce, and the sauced onions must be thoroughly cold and firm before crumbing. An hour in the refrigerator, or twenty minutes in the freezer, is what makes them handleable; warm sauce slides off in the fat and the fritter comes apart.
- What "green onions as possible" meansLarge scallions or spring onions with bulbs about the thickness of a finger. Trim the roots and cut the green tops so each piece is roughly six inches. Slim supermarket scallions work but give a thin, mostly-coating fritter.
- Blade of maceA blade is one piece of the dried outer casing of nutmeg, sold whole in spice shops. A scant pinch of ground mace, or a light grating of nutmeg, substitutes; it is a background note, not a feature.
- Equal milk and stockEnough to cover, however much that takes for the pan and the number of onions. The poaching liquid is worth straining and using in the white sauce in place of plain milk.
- Fifteen minutes is a maximum"Barely tender" is the target. Scallions at a bare simmer are usually there in six to eight minutes; a full quarter hour turns them slippery and they will collapse when you coat them.
- The thick white sauceTwo tablespoons flour to one cup milk gives a coating sauce that sets on cooling. Cook the roux and milk out for a few minutes so it does not taste of raw flour, and season it — the sauce is most of the interior flavour.
- "Smoking hot fat" is too hotWritten when cooks judged fat by sight. Use 365–375F. Above that the crumbs brown before the inside warms, and the fat itself begins to break down.
- YieldA dozen onions makes four small side servings or a plate of appetisers. Fry in batches of three or four so the fat temperature holds, and drain on a rack rather than paper so the crust stays crisp.
- The batter optionIf you use fritter batter instead, skip the sauce and crumbs entirely: dry the poached onions well, dip and fry straight away. It is faster and considerably less fragile.
Fritters of this kind belong to the long tradition of the French croquette, in which a stiff sauce béchamel is used as a binder and a chilled shell around something already cooked, as in the potato, chicken or ham croquettes that fill the savoury pages of turn-of-the-century American cookbooks.