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Fritter Batter
1 cup flour. 2 eggs. 1 tablespoon butter or fat. 1 tablespoon lemon juice. 1/2 cup water.
Beat yolks as for cake, add water, beat into this the flour and lemon juice. Add fat just before using, add beaten whites last.
A plain coating batter of the sort Mrs. Wilson expected a cook to keep in mind rather than look up. The whole point is the separated eggs: the whites go in last and unbeaten mixing will cost you the lift.
- "Beat yolks as for cake"Means beaten until thick, pale and ribboning off the whisk — two to three minutes with a hand mixer. It is not a token stir; the yolk foam carries part of the batter's lightness.
- Fold, do not beat, the whitesBeat the whites to soft peaks and fold them in with a spatula in two additions. The instruction to add them "last" is the hinge of the recipe: once they are in, the batter should be used within a few minutes before it deflates.
- Melt the fatA tablespoon of cold butter will not disperse. Melt and cool it slightly, then stir it in just before the whites, as directed.
- The lemon juiceAcid is generally held to tenderize the batter and keep it from turning tough and bready. Cider vinegar in the same quantity can be substituted if you are frying something savory.
- ConsistencyOne cup flour to half a cup water plus two yolks gives a batter roughly the thickness of heavy cream once the whites are in. If it sheets off the spoon in a stream rather than dropping, add flour a tablespoon at a time; if it sits in a lump, thin with water.
- SeasoningMrs. Wilson gives none. Add 1/4 teaspoon salt for savory fritters, or a tablespoon of sugar plus salt for apple, banana or fruit fritters.
- FryingDeep fat at 365–375F. Below that the batter absorbs grease; above it the outside colors before the interior sets. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- YieldRoughly 1 1/2 cups of batter; the number of fritters will depend entirely on what is dipped and how thickly it is coated.
Fritter batter is one of the workhorse formulas that early twentieth-century cookbooks printed once and then referred back to a dozen times, which is why this entry makes no mention of what is to be fried. Mrs. Wilson wrote her column and books during and just after the First World War, when she was known for food-conservation cookery, and a batter like this stretched small amounts of fruit, leftover meat or vegetables into a dish that filled a plate. The separated-egg method — yolk foam beaten "as for cake," whites folded in at the last moment — descends from the older English and French practice of leavening batters mechanically rather than chemically, and it predates the widespread use of baking powder in fritters. The word itself comes through Middle English from Old French friture, ultimately the Latin for frying.