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Bread and Butter Fritters
4 slices bread and butter 1 tablespoon raspberry jam 1/2 ounce of sifted sugar Spread the jam on the bread and butter, and press them well together, cut into rounds with a cutter, dip in a good batter, and fry a golden brown. Serve with the sugar sprinkled over. Any other jam may be used.
A jam sandwich cut into rounds, battered and deep-fried — the whole thing hinges on the batter, which the original declines to specify.
- "A good batter"The original leaves this entirely to the cook. A plain coating batter of flour, an egg and enough milk or milk-and-water to make a thick pouring consistency is the usual reading; it should coat the back of a spoon, since thin batter slides off the buttered edges and lets jam leak into the fat.
- Sifted sugarFine sugar passed through a sieve; in period usage this usually means caster-fine sugar rather than a modern icing sugar, though the term was applied loosely. Half an ounce is about a tablespoon — a light dusting over the hot fritters.
- Frying temperatureThe original says only "fry a golden brown." In modern terms deep fat at roughly 350-375F suits: below that the bread drinks oil and turns heavy, much above and the outside colours before the inside warms through. Fry briefly, turning once.
- Seal the edgesPress the sandwich firmly all over before cutting, and cut with a sharp round cutter rather than a knife so the two slices compress at the rim. Any gap and the jam boils out into the pan.
- Bread choiceUse a firm, close-crumbed white loaf a day old. Fresh soft sandwich bread collapses under the batter, and airy artisan crumb soaks up fat.
- YieldFour slices make two sandwiches, giving roughly four to six rounds depending on cutter size — enough for two as a dessert. Serve immediately; they stiffen as they cool.
- JamA stiff, well-set preserve works best. Loose modern fruit spreads and low-sugar jams run at frying heat.
Frying bread with something sweet is one of the oldest tricks in the European kitchen — pain perdu, poor knights of Windsor, and their many cousins all exist to make stale loaf worth eating. A jam-filled version, cut into rounds and fried in batter, is at home in British cookery of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when writers on household cookery liked to give small sweet dishes built from bread, batter and preserves a name and send them to table. Such dishes were cheap and needed no meat, which made them useful in any kitchen working without it.