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Vegetable Fritters
Cook the vegetables thoroughly; drain them; chop fine and add to the batter. Drop in boiling hot fat; drain and dry on paper.
This is a method note rather than a full recipe: Mrs. Fryer assumes you already have a fritter batter from elsewhere in the book and are looking for a way to use up cooked vegetables. The quantities are left to you.
- The missing batterA workable plain fritter batter is roughly 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, a pinch of salt, 1 egg and about 2/3 cup milk, beaten smooth; the book itself gives no proportions here. It should coat a spoon thickly and fall in a lump, not a ribbon; thin batter will disperse in the fat.
- ProportionsUse no more than about a cup of chopped cooked vegetable to a cup of flour's worth of batter. Vegetables overloaded into batter will not hold together when they hit the fat.
- Dry the vegetablesThis is the hinge. Drained is not the same as dry — boiled carrot, corn, peas or cauliflower carry a great deal of water, and wet vegetables both slacken the batter and spit dangerously in hot fat. Press them in a towel before chopping.
- "Boiling hot fat"The book gives no temperature; in modern terms this generally corresponds to somewhere around 365-375F. Below that the fritters absorb grease; above, the outside colors before the interior batter sets. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash, until deep gold through.
- Drain and dry on paperThe recipe does not say which paper; unglazed butcher or brown paper is the likeliest reading, and paper towels do the same job. Keep the drained fritters uncovered in a low oven if you are frying in batches, since covering them steams the crust soft.
- Which vegetables workCorn, peas, salsify, parsnip, cauliflower and leftover mashed squash all behave well. Watery vegetables such as boiled marrow, cucumber or spinach are poor candidates unless squeezed hard first.
- Yield and servingWith a batter of the size suggested above you would get roughly a dozen fritters, but the recipe itself fixes no quantity. Salt them the moment they come out of the fat and serve at once; the title and its placement among vegetables suggest a savory dish rather than a sweet.
Fritters of this kind belong to the household economy of the early twentieth century, when a cookbook's vegetable chapter was as concerned with yesterday's boiled leftovers as with anything fresh. Batter frying gave a second, more appetizing life to vegetables that had already been cooked to softness — the standard treatment of the period, when vegetables were commonly boiled far longer than we would now.