Potato Fritters
INGREDIENTS for dish for 3 or 4 persons. -2 large potatoes, 3 eggs, 2 tablespoonfuls of cream, 2 ditto of raisin or sweet wine, 1 dessertspoonful of lemon-juice, ½ teaspoonful of grated nutmeg, hot lard. AVERAGE COST, 9d.
Boil the potatoes, and beat them up lightly with a fork, but do not use a spoon, as that would make them heavy. Beat the eggs well, leaving out one of the whites; add the other ingredients, and beat all together for at least 20 minutes, or until the batter is extremely light. Put plenty of good lard into a frying-pan, and drop a tablespoonful of the batter at a time into it, and fry the fritters a nice brown. Serve them with the following sauce: - A glass of sherry mixed with the strained juice of a lemon, and sufficient white sugar to sweeten the whole nicely. Warm these ingredients, and serve the sauce separately in a tureen. The fritters should be neatly dished on a white d'oyley or an ornamented paper, and pounded sugar sprinkled over them. They should be well drained on a piece of blotting-paper before the fire previously to being dished.
TIME. From 6 to 8 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Potato Pasty. INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 persons.---1½ lb. of rump-steak or mutton cutlets, pepper and salt to taste, pint of weak broth or gravy, 1 oz. of butter, mashed potatoes. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 10d.
Place the meat, cut in small pieces, at the bottom of the pan; season it with pepper and salt, and add the gravy and butter broken into small pieces. Put on POTATO PASTY PAN. the perforated plate, with its valve-pipe screwed on, and fill up the whole space to the top of the tube with nicely-mashed potatoes mixed with a little milk, and finish the surface of them in any ornamental manner. If carefully baked, the potatoes will be covered with a delicate brown crust, retaining all the savoury steam rising from the meat. Send it to table as it comes from the oven, with a napkin folded round it.
TIME.-40 to 60 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
POTATO PUDDING.
A sweet fritter rather than a savoury one: mashed potato lightened with egg, enriched with cream and wine, fried in lard and dusted with sugar. The page also runs on into a second recipe, Potato Pasty, which needs its own notes.
- The hinge: keep the potato lightMash while hot with a fork only, as Beeton says, or better still press through a ricer; a spoon or a food processor develops the starch and the fritters turn gluey. The batter should be foamy and barely holding together, not a stiff paste.
- Twenty minutes of beatingA long haul by hand; with a stand mixer or hand whisk a few minutes at high speed should give similar aeration. The reserved egg white, which Beeton simply leaves out, can be whipped separately to soft peaks and folded in for extra lift.
- MeasuresA dessertspoonful is about two teaspoons. A "glass" of sherry in Victorian cookery is roughly a wineglass, 2 fl oz. Two large potatoes means about 12 oz to 1 lb cooked weight.
- Raisin or sweet wineHome-made raisin wine was a common English household wine and is effectively gone. Substitute a sweet sherry, Madeira, Marsala or a sweet white; the same bottle then serves for the sauce.
- FryingLard heated to 350-375F. Deep enough that the tablespoonfuls float and turn; six to eight minutes is right for fritters this size, and they should be a deep gold, not pale. Fry in batches so the fat does not drop below temperature.
- DrainingBlotting paper before the fire was the Victorian answer to kitchen paper. Drain on paper towel in a low oven, around 250F, to hold the first batches without them going limp.
- Yield and servingThree or four as a dessert course, about a dozen fritters. Sprinkle with caster sugar (Beeton's "pounded sugar") and hand the warm sherry-and-lemon sauce separately. Do not let the sauce boil or the alcohol and perfume go with it.
- The Potato Pasty that followsThis is a separate recipe and needs a specific vessel: a pasty pan with a perforated inner plate and a screwed-on central valve-pipe, long obsolete. A deep pie dish with mashed potato piled over seasoned meat and gravy achieves much the same thing. The book says only 'if carefully baked' and gives no temperature; a moderate oven for the stated 40 to 60 minutes. Rump steak cut small may still be firm in that time, so braising steak already cooked is the safer option.
Potato fritters of this kind belong to the long English tradition of the sweet potato pudding, a seventeenth-century development which treated the potato much as cooks treated ground almonds or breadcrumbs: as a bland, rich base for eggs, cream, wine, nutmeg and lemon. Beeton's book is full of such dishes, and they can look odd now that the potato has been pushed firmly onto the savoury side of the meal. Nutmeg and sack (sweet fortified wine) were standard sweet flavourings in English cookery from the seventeenth century onward, and the pairing survived in puddings long after it had left most other dishes. The 9d costing, and the assumption that a household possesses a purpose-made potato pasty pan with a valve-pipe, are both reminders of who the book was written for: a middle-class kitchen with money for specialised ironmongery and a servant with twenty minutes to spend beating a batter.