Shell Fritters
teaspoon salt grated rind and juice 1 lemon 5 eggs 1 tablespoon flavoring Mix butter, fruit juice, rind and water; boil two minutes. Add sugar and flour. Beat until mixture leaves sides of pan. Cool. Add eggs, one at a time, and beat five minutes between each addition. Drop by spoonfuls into hot fat and fry ten to twelve minutes. Drain on brown paper, sprinkle with sugar, and serve with chocolate, caramel, orange, or wine sauce.
This is a choux paste — the same cooked flour-and-egg batter used for cream puffs — dropped into deep fat rather than baked, so it puffs into a hollow shell. The legible ingredient line covers only the salt, lemon, eggs and flavoring; the butter, sugar, flour and water called for in the method have no stated quantities here.
- The hinge: fat temperatureKeep the fat moderate, in the region of 350F or a little below, and no hotter. These shells need the full ten to twelve minutes the recipe allows to set inside and dry out; hotter fat browns the outside long before the centre is cooked, and the fritters collapse as they cool.
- Let them turn themselvesProperly made choux fritters roll over in the fat as they expand and often split open. Do not crowd the pan — they roughly triple in size, and crowding drops the fat temperature.
- Beating the eggs inFive minutes of hand beating between each of five eggs reflects a kitchen without machines. A stand mixer will do the job in far less time; what matters is that each egg is fully absorbed and the paste is smooth and glossy before the next goes in.
- Cool before the eggsThe cooked paste should be lukewarm, not hot, or the eggs will scramble. Spreading it on a plate for ten minutes is enough.
- Sugar in the pasteSweetened choux browns faster than plain. Watch the colour rather than the clock at the end, and pull them at deep golden brown.
- Brown paperUnprinted kraft paper or a paper bag was the standard drain. Use a rack over a tray; paper towels trap steam and soften the shells.
- FlavoringThe tablespoon of "flavoring" is most likely vanilla or another extract; the recipe does not say when to add it, so fold it in with the eggs.
- YieldWith the flour, butter, sugar and water quantities missing from the page, the batch size can only be guessed at; a five-egg choux paste would normally give something in the region of two dozen fritters.
Lowney's Cook Book was issued in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and it steers its readers toward the company's product — hence chocolate heading the list of sauces here. The fritter itself is a version of what French cooks call beignets soufflés: pâte à choux fried instead of baked, a trick generally traced to nineteenth-century French pastry practice and much reproduced in American cookbooks once cream puffs became a household staple. Deep-fried choux survives today mainly as the French cruller, but in 1907 it was a respectable dinner-party dessert, plated with a sweet sauce and a dusting of sugar.