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Batter for Fruit Fritters
1 cup flour 2 tablespoons sugar teaspoon salt grated rind 1 lemon 2 eggs ½ cup milk Mix and sift the dry ingredients; add beaten yolks, lemon rind, and milk. Beat, cut, and fold in the beaten whites of eggs and use for all kinds of fruits.
A plain egg-and-milk fritter batter, written on the assumption that the cook already knows how to fry. Everything about the frying itself has been left out, so the notes below fill that gap.
- The salt is a typographical casualtyThe salt appears to be missing a fraction -- the original prints "teaspoon salt" with no quantity mark before it, most likely a dropped fraction. A quarter to a half teaspoon suits a sweet batter of this size.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe never mentions fat. Fritters of this type go into deep fat at 365-375F; below that the batter drinks oil, above it the coating colors before the fruit inside has heated through. Two to three minutes, turning once, is usually enough.
- "Beat, cut, and fold"Three distinct actions. Beat the yolk batter smooth, then cut down through the whites with the edge of the spoon or spatula and fold them over rather than stirring, so the air stays in. The whites are the only leavening here; there is no baking powder.
- Batter consistencyOne cup of flour to half a cup of milk plus two eggs gives a thick, clinging batter, not a pourable one. It should coat a slice of apple and stay put. Thin it a spoonful of milk at a time if it seems stiff, but err thick.
- Preparing the fruitApple rings, banana lengths, canned pineapple and drained peaches all work. Pat the fruit thoroughly dry and dust it lightly with flour before dipping, or the batter slides off in the fat.
- Lemon rindGrate only the yellow zest; the white pith beneath is bitter. A microplane makes short work of it.
- YieldEnough to coat roughly two large apples' worth of rings, or about 16 to 20 fritters. Drain on paper and dust with sugar while still hot; they soften and toughen as they stand, so fry them to order.
Fritter batters like this one were a standard fixture of American cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century onward, the deep-fat equivalent of a pancake and a way to stretch a little fruit into a hot dessert or a supper sweet. Lowney's Cook Book (1907), compiled by Maria Willett Howard, was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and belongs to the long tradition of promotional cookbooks that surrounded a firm's own product with a full general repertoire so the volume would earn a place on the kitchen shelf. The instruction to "use for all kinds of fruits" is characteristic of the period's economy: one master batter, adapted to whatever the season or the store cupboard supplied.