Home › Vegetables › Apple Fritters
Apple Fritters
Choose sour apples; pare, core and cut them into small slices. Stir into fritter batter and fry in boiling hot fat, Drain on paper: sprinkle with powdered sugar and serve. 3 bananas 1 cup flour
A fragment of a recipe as much as a recipe: it assumes you already have a fritter batter on hand, and the last line has clearly drifted in from the banana fritters that sat on the facing leaf. Both gaps are easy to close.
- The stray last line"3 bananas 1 cup flour" does not belong to this recipe and looks like a measurement line picked up from a neighbouring one, most likely banana fritters. Ignore it for the apples.
- The missing batterThe book assumes a fritter batter already to hand. A typical batter of this sort is about 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, a pinch of salt, 1 egg and roughly 2/3 cup milk, beaten smooth and thick enough to coat the fruit rather than run off it; period recipes vary widely in the details.
- Sour applesThis means tart cooking apples, not spoiled ones. Granny Smith, Bramley or Northern Spy hold their shape and keep some acidity against the sugar; a sweet eating apple collapses into blandness.
- "Boiling hot fat"Fat does not boil — the phrase means fully heated deep fat, 365-375F. Below that the batter absorbs grease; above 385F the outside colours before the apple softens. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- Slice thicknessCut rings or slices about 1/4 inch thick. Thicker than that and the batter is done while the apple is still raw and squeaky.
- Drain on paperThe original means unprinted kitchen paper or a brown bag; use paper towel or, better, a wire rack, which keeps the underside from steaming soft.
- Sugaring"powdered sugar" in books of this period may mean a finely ground granulated sugar rather than modern confectioners' sugar; either will do here. Dust it on while the fritters are hot so it clings, and serve at once.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Two medium apples with a batter of the size above will make a plateful, roughly enough for four.
History: Fritters — fruit or vegetable bound in batter and fried in deep fat — are long established in English and American cooking, and apple was among the commonest fruits used, being one of the few that kept through the winter. In household books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, apple fritters could serve as either a sweet or a savoury: sugared, they closed a meal; unsugared, they were often served alongside roast pork or ham. If the book is one of the punched, re-orderable loose-leaf collections that circulated in the early twentieth century, that format would help explain both the extreme brevity here — a basic fritter batter would sit on another leaf — and the orphaned line of banana measurements at the end.