Fritters, Indian
INGREDIENTS for dish for 5 or 6 persons.-3 tablespoonfuls of flour, boiling water, the yolks of 4 eggs, the whites of 2, hot lard or clarified dripping,jam.
AVERAGE COST, 9d.
Put the flour into a basin, and pour over it sufficient boiling water to make it into a stiff paste, taking care to stir and beat it well, to prevent it getting lumpy. Leave it a little time to cool, and then break into it (without beating them at first) the yolks of 4 eggs and the whites of 2, and stir and beat all well together.
Have ready some boiling lard or butter; drop a dessertspoonful of batter in at a time, and fry the fritters of a light brown.
They should rise so much as to be almost like balls.
Serve on a dish, with a spoonful of preserve or marmalade dropped in between each fritter. This is an excellent dish for an hasty addition to dinner, if a guest unexpectedly arrives, it being so easily and quickly made, and it is always a great favourite.
FRITTER MOULD.
TIME.-From 5 to 8 minutes to fry the fritters.
SEASONABLE at any time.
The ingredient list has been mangled in transcription — the stray "spoonful of preserve or" and "jam" belong to the serving note at the end. Read it as: 3 tablespoonfuls flour, boiling water, 4 egg yolks, 2 egg whites, hot lard or clarified dripping, and jam or marmalade to serve.
- The hinge: scald the flour properlyPour the boiling water on in a thin stream and beat hard until you have a smooth, stiff paste that leaves the side of the basin. Lumps here will never disperse, and the fritters will not puff.
- Let the paste cool before the eggsBeeton says only to leave it "a little time to cool". In practice that means warm rather than hot; eggs added to near-boiling paste will scramble in it.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe says only "boiling lard or butter". As a modern working figure, around 350-360F (175-180C) suits: hotter and the outside browns before the inside sets; cooler and the fritters absorb fat instead of ballooning. Five to eight minutes fits that heat, and they will often turn themselves as they swell.
- FatClarified dripping is rendered meat fat, usually beef, with the water and residues strained out; lard or a neutral high-smoke-point oil behaves the same way. Butter, offered as an alternative in the method, will burn at frying heat unless clarified.
- Quantity is on the small sideThree tablespoonfuls of flour with four yolks and two whites makes a very rich but modest batter. It is headed for 5 or 6 persons, but the yield is small; double it if the dish is doing real work at table.
- DessertspoonfulA Victorian dessertspoon is about 2 teaspoons, roughly 10 ml. Drop them small; the whole point is that they rise "almost like balls", and a large spoonful will stay raw in the middle.
- Draining and servingLift onto paper before dishing, and serve at once — they collapse as they cool. The jam or marmalane spooned between them is the only sweetening in the dish; the batter itself has no sugar.
- The "fritter mould"The illustration caption belongs to the surrounding fritter entries rather than to this one. Nothing in this recipe uses a mould; the batter is dropped free-form into the fat.
Despite the name, nothing in this recipe is Indian: it is a scalded-flour paste enriched with egg and fried in deep fat, the same principle as a French beignet souffl\