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Tomato Fritters
3 tablespoons chopped onion 2 tablespoons chopped red pepper cup cornstarch 3 cups tomatoes bit of bay leaf 4 tablespoons butter 4 cloves 1 teaspoon salt 1 egg Melt butter; add onion and pepper, cook five minutes; add cornstarch, tomatoes, cloves, bay leaf and salt. Cook until thick. Strain. Add beaten egg. Cool in buttered tin. Cut in any shape desired. Dip in crumbs, egg and crumbs, and fry in deep fat. 2 cups flour 1 cup water cup sugar ½ cup butter
This is a croquette-style fritter: a thick tomato panade set firm, cut, breaded and deep-fried. The success or failure is entirely in how stiff the base is before it chills.
- Cook the base far thicker than seems rightThe tomato and cornstarch mixture must be stiff enough to hold a spoon upright and pull away from the pan in a mass. If it only thickens to a sauce, the cut pieces will collapse in the fat.
- The cornstarch quantity is incompleteThe ingredient list gives "cup cornstarch" with the fraction lost. For 3 cups of tomato, something in the range of 1/3 to 1/2 cup cornstarch should give a sliceable paste; start at the lower end and cook it down further if needed.
- Tomatoes"3 cups tomatoes" in books of this period may well mean canned or stewed tomatoes with their juice rather than fresh diced. A 28-ounce can, broken up, is in the right range.
- Strain before the eggThe straining removes the cloves and bay along with the onion and pepper solids and any tomato skin and seed, and it is done while the mixture is hot. Beat the egg in off the heat and stir briskly so it thickens rather than scrambles.
- Chilling"Cool in buttered tin" gives neither depth nor time; spreading about 3/4 inch deep and chilling until cold and firm, a couple of hours, works well. Warm paste cannot be breaded.
- Frying temperatureDeep fat for croquettes wants 375F. Cooler fat lets the breading soak and the interior soften; hotter scorches the crumbs before the center warms through.
- YieldRoughly 16 to 20 fritters from a 3-cup base, enough for six as a vegetable side or a light supper course.
Vegetable croquettes of this kind were common in American cookery around 1900, when the deep kettle of fat was standard equipment and a stiff starch-bound paste was one familiar way to turn a puree into something that could be handled, breaded and fried. Lowney's book, published by the chocolate company as a promotional volume, followed the household-science style of its day: cornstarch rather than a flour roux, precise five-minute sweating of aromatics, and cloves and bay to give a plain tomato base some depth. Fritters like these may well have occupied something like the place a fried appetizer does now, and they had the practical virtue of using up canned tomatoes in winter.