Currant Fritters
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 persons. pint of milk, 2 tablespoonfuls of flour, 4 eggs, 3 tablespoonfuls of boiled rice, 3 tablespoonfuls of currants, sugar to taste, a very little grated nutmeg, hot lard or clarified dripping.
AVERAGE COST, 10d.
Put the milk into a basin with the flour, which should previously be rubbed to a smooth batter with a little cold milk; stir these ingredients together; add the eggs, well whisked, the rice, currants, sugar and nutmeg. Beat the mixture for a few minutes, and, if not sufficiently thick, add a little more boiled rice; drop it, in small quantities, into a pan of boiling lard or clarified dripping; fry the fritters a nice brown and, when done, drain them on a piece of blotting-paper, before the fire. Pile them on a white d'oyley, strew over sifted sugar, and serve them very hot. Send a cut lemon to table with them.
CURRANTS.
TIME. From 8 to 10 minutes to fry the fritters.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A batter fritter built on leftover boiled rice, which does most of the thickening. The recipe is straightforward, but several of its measures and materials need translating.
- The milk quantity is unclearThe text as printed reads "pint of milk," with a fraction apparently lost. Half an imperial pint (10 fl oz / 1¼ cups) would suit the other quantities; a full pint with only 2 tablespoons of flour will not thicken, so start with about 1 cup and judge by the batter.
- Currants are the dried kindThese are dried Zante currants — small dark raisins — not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Very dry modern currants can be softened briefly in warm water and dried thoroughly before use; any left exposed on the surface may catch in the fat.
- The rice is the hingePlain boiled rice, cooked soft and cooled, is what holds the fritter together. The instruction to add more rice if the mixture is thin is the real control: aim for a batter that holds its shape on the spoon rather than running off it.
- Frying temperature"Boiling lard" means fat at roughly 350–365F, deep enough for the fritters to float. Below that they absorb fat and go greasy; much above it and the outside colours before the eggy centre sets.
- TimeThe book allows 8 to 10 minutes to fry the fritters. Small spoon-sized fritters in fat at 350F will usually be done sooner, turned once, and deep brown throughout — check one by breaking it open before committing the batch.
- Fats and drainingDripping is fat rendered from roast meat, most often beef; clarifying it removes water and meat residues. Lard, or any neutral oil, works. Blotting paper before the fire means paper towels on a rack in a low oven, around 200F, to keep the batch hot without steaming.
- ServingA d'oyley is a decorative napkin under the pile. Sifted sugar is confectioners' or superfine sugar, and the cut lemon at table is there to be squeezed over — the acid is what stops the whole thing tasting flatly sweet.
- YieldAs stated, four servings; the number of fritters will depend on how large the spoonfuls are. Best eaten within minutes of frying.
Fritters of this sort are among the oldest sweet dishes in English cookery, and by the mid-nineteenth century household manuals commonly carried a page of them: apple, orange, bread, rice, currant. The rice here reveals the domestic logic of the book — a cold remnant of boiled rice, too little to serve on its own, turned into a hot dish for four at a cost of tenpence. The currants themselves were dried grapes imported chiefly from the Ionian islands and the Greek mainland, widely sold by the pound and so ubiquitous in Victorian baking that "currant" in a recipe title almost always meant the dried fruit rather than the fresh berry. The note to "send a cut lemon to table" and the pile on a white d'oyley belong to the same period sensibility as Beeton's average costs: even the plainest nursery-adjacent dish was expected to arrive looking as though it had been intended.