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Fritter Beans
4 tablespoons milk 4 tablespoons grated cheese salt, pepper, cayenne Melt butter and lard, add milk; when boiling, add flour and seasonings; cook two minutes, stirring constantly; add cheese and eggs, cool, drop from teaspoon into hot fat, drain, and serve with soups.
This is a cheese choux paste fried in small drops — the soup garnish sometimes called pois de friture or fritter beans. The transcription carries only part of the ingredient list, so the proportions have to be reasoned out from the method.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the milk (4 tablespoons), cheese (4 tablespoons grated) and seasonings survive in the list, yet the method calls for butter, lard, flour and eggs. The proportions cannot be recovered from the text; eggs would be beaten in one at a time until the paste falls heavily from the spoon, and any figure beyond that is a guess.
- This is pâte à chouxBoiling liquid and fat, flour dumped in at once, two minutes of hard stirring to dry the paste, then eggs off the heat — that is the standard choux sequence. The hinge is the drying step: if the paste is still wet when the eggs go in, the beans will not puff and will drink fat instead.
- Cool before the eggsNote that the recipe as transcribed puts "cool" after the eggs rather than before them. Standard choux practice is the reverse: eggs beaten into a paste much above about 150F can set in streaks, giving speckled, flat fritters.
- LardStill sold, usually near the shortening; leaf lard is better but rarer. Butter alone works, though the paste is slightly softer and browns faster.
- The cheeseAn unqualified "grated cheese" in a cookbook of this period most likely points to a dry hard cheese, which in American kitchens would usually have been aged Cheddar or an imported Parmesan. Four tablespoons grated is roughly an ounce. Fresh or high-moisture cheese will slacken the paste.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe says only "hot fat"; for fritters of this kind that is usually taken as somewhere around 360-375F. Below that they absorb grease and stay dense; much above it they colour before the interior sets. Drop them in small batches and turn once as they rise.
- Yield and servingWith the quantities missing, any yield is guesswork; the recipe's "drop from teaspoon" suggests small drops rather than pea-sized beads. They are floated on clear soup at the table and soften quickly, so fry them last.
Fritter beans belong to a family of fried garnishes that clear soups once demanded as a matter of course: profiteroles, royale custards, marrow balls, croutons cut into shapes -- pellets of choux paste no bigger than a pea, dropped into fat and scattered over consomme so the eater got a crisp element in an otherwise thin dish. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer. The garnish faded with the multi-course dinner that required it -- once soup stopped being a formal separate course, nobody needed something to float on it.