Apple Fritters
Core and pare apples, cut in round slices. For each eight apples, mix one fourth cup sugar and four tablespoons lemon juice. Let apples stand in this mixture for one hour; dip in fritter batter; fry in hot fat; drain on brown paper. Sprinkle with sugar.
A straightforward apple ring fritter; the only real omission is the batter itself, which the book expects you to find elsewhere in its pages. Everything else hinges on fat temperature.
- Fat temperature"Hot fat" is not specified here; somewhere around 365-375F is the usual modern range for fritters. Cooler and the rings absorb grease before the batter sets; much hotter and the coating browns while the apple is still raw and crisp.
- The fritter batterAssume a simple pouring batter: about 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, a pinch of salt, 1 egg and roughly 2/3 cup milk, thick enough to coat the slice without running off. Any standard fritter batter recipe from a modern book will do the same job.
- Cutting the ringsAn apple corer gives you the ring shape the recipe assumes. Slices about 1/4 inch thick cook through in the time the batter needs to brown; 1/2 inch leaves the centre hard.
- Why the hour in sugar and lemonThe maceration draws out a little juice and seasons the fruit, but it also leaves the surface wet. Drain the slices and pat them dry before dipping, or the batter will slide off in the fat.
- Apple choiceA firm tart apple holds its ring shape. Softer varieties collapse into sauce inside the shell of batter, which is not unpleasant but is not what is described.
- DrainingBrown paper was the standard grease blotter of the era; paper towels on a rack are the modern equivalent. Sprinkle the sugar while the fritters are still hot so it adheres.
- YieldEight apples will give a large number of rings; the exact count depends on how thick you cut them. Scale down freely; the sugar and lemon are a ratio, not a fixed quantity.
- Batch sizeFry a few at a time. Crowding the pan drops the fat temperature sharply and is the usual cause of soggy fritters.
Apple fritters belong to a very old European family of battered, fried fruit, and appear in English cookery books long before American ones. Their placement here under "Bread" reflects an arrangement in which fritters, griddle cakes and doughnuts were grouped with batters and doughs rather than with desserts. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored cookbooks of the period it surrounded its chocolate recipes with a complete general household repertoire, so that a cook who bought it for the candy would keep it for everything else. The instruction to drain on brown paper is suggestive of the book's era: grocery wrapping paper was the standard kitchen blotter before absorbent paper towels were widely sold.