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Batter for Frying Sweets
4 ounces of flour 1 ounce of butter 1/2 ounce of sugar 1 gill of water Mix the flour with a quarter of pint of cold water to a smooth paste. Dissolve the butter in a saucepan; then stir in the flour and the water. Add the sugar last. It is then ready for use.
A plain fritter batter with no egg and no leavening, meant for coating apple rings, banana halves, or slices of pineapple before deep-frying. It is simple enough that the only variable worth watching is consistency.
- A gillA gill is a quarter pint, which the recipe itself confirms: 5 fl oz by the imperial measure, 4 fl oz by the American. Either works here; start with the smaller amount and add the rest only if the batter is too stiff to coat.
- Weights to volume4 oz flour is a scant cup (about 113 g); 1 oz butter is 2 tablespoons; 1/2 oz sugar is about a tablespoon. These are weights in the original, and flour especially is worth weighing if you can.
- "Dissolve the butter"This means melt it, not brown it. Take the pan off the heat before the flour-and-water paste goes in, or the flour will seize into lumps against the hot metal.
- Mix cold, then combineThe hinge of the method is slaking the flour in cold water first. Adding dry flour to warm butter gives a lumpy batter that is harder to smooth out afterwards.
- No egg, no raising agentThis is a coating batter, not a puffed one. It fries to a thin, crisp, slightly brittle shell rather than the light jacket a beaten egg white or a spoonful of baking powder would give. Judge it on those terms.
- ConsistencyAim for the thickness of heavy cream: it should cling to a slice of apple in an even film and run off in a ribbon, not a sheet. Thin with a teaspoon of water at a time.
- FryingDeep-fry at 350-375F. Below that the batter absorbs oil and goes greasy; above it, the coating colours before the fruit inside has softened.
- YieldProbably enough to coat something like a pound of prepared fruit, though the recipe gives no yield. Use it the day it is made.
Fritter batters like this one belong to a long line of economical coatings, plainer than the eggy or beer-leavened versions found elsewhere. Household books of this kind routinely offered flour-and-water batters as an everyday option, with eggs treated as an improvement rather than a requirement. The small quantity of butter here does some of the work egg yolk would, shortening the batter so it fries crisp instead of tough, and the half ounce of sugar helps it brown.