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Cumquat Fritters
Wash cumquats; cut in halves; let stand in fritter batter one hour; fry in deep fat; drain on brown paper. 1 cup corn 1 cup flour 2 teaspoons salt
A very compressed entry, and the ingredient list attached to it does not match the instructions — read the whole thing before starting.
- The ingredient list is not this recipeOne cup of corn, one cup of flour and two teaspoons of salt is a corn fritter batter, and the salt is roughly four times what a cup of flour wants. Treat these lines as stray type from a neighbouring recipe; the instructions call for "fritter batter," presumably a formula given elsewhere in the book.
- What fritter batter meantA period fruit fritter batter is about 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, a pinch of salt, 1 egg and enough milk to make a thick coating batter — thick enough to cling, not to pour off. Any modern fruit-fritter batter will do the same work.
- The hour-long soakThis is the hinge. Halved kumquats sitting in batter for an hour bleed juice into it and thin it out. Check the batter before frying and stiffen it with a spoonful of flour if it has slackened, or macerate the fruit in a little sugar separately and batter it just before it goes in the fat.
- Deal with the seedsKumquats carry one to several hard pips. Halving exposes them; flick them out with a knife tip before the fruit goes into the batter.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature; modern deep-frying practice for fritters is about 365-375F. Below that the batter drinks oil; above it the coating colours before the fruit inside heats through. Figure a couple of minutes a batch, turning once.
- DrainingBrown paper was the standard drain of the period. A wire rack over a sheet pan keeps the undersides crisp; paper towel works but softens the bottom crust.
- Quantity and servingServing -- Serve hot, dusted with confectioners' sugar; the fruit stays sharp and the peel is the sweetest part.
Kumquats (Citrus japonica) came to Europe from China in the mid-nineteenth century — the old genus name Fortunella honours the plant collector Robert Fortune, who brought the fruit west — and by the time Lowney's Cook Book appeared in 1907 they were being grown commercially in Florida and sold north as a winter novelty, often candied or preserved whole. That novelty status may explain the entry's brevity: a cook who already knew a house fritter batter needed only to be told that this new small citrus could be halved and dipped like an apple ring. It is also a fruit that rewards the treatment, since kumquats are eaten skin and all, the peel sweet and the pulp acid, so frying softens the rind without any of the peeling and coring that other fruit fritters demand.