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Bread Crumb Fritters
1 cup flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 cup fine bread crumbs 1 1/2 cups milk 1 egg 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon molasses Sift together flour, salt and baking powder; add bread crumbs, then the milk slowly; add well-beaten egg, butter and molasses. Fry in deep hot fat.
A thrifty drop fritter that turns stale bread into something worth eating. The batter is loose by design, but a few details decide whether it fries crisp or greasy.
- Let the crumbs swellDry, finely ground crumbs absorb the milk unevenly at first, so let the mixed batter stand 10 to 15 minutes before frying. Otherwise it thins in the pan and the fritters spread and soak fat.
- Crumbs, specifically"Fine bread crumbs" here means dried crumbs from stale bread, not the coarse fresh crumb of a soft loaf and not seasoned commercial breadcrumbs. If you use fresh soft crumbs, hold back a few tablespoons of the milk.
- Fat temperature"Deep hot fat" is not specified; for a batter like this, aim for roughly 365-375F. Below that the batter drinks oil; above it the outside colors before the center sets, which matters because these are dropped thick rather than shaped thin.
- Melt the butterA tablespoon of cold butter will not disperse into a thin batter. Melt it and add it with the egg so the fat is evenly distributed.
- Size and handlingDrop by rounded tablespoons, four or five at a time so the fat temperature holds. They take roughly 3 to 4 minutes, turning once if they do not right themselves.
- The molassesOne tablespoon is for color and a faint bitterness, not sweetness. It also browns fast, which is another reason to keep the fat from running hot.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder is the usual stand-in for the branded Royal called for, though the older cream-of-tartar powders released most of their gas on wetting, so a batter left to stand will behave somewhat differently.
- Yield and servingAbout 18 to 20 small fritters, enough for four. They want maple syrup, warm molasses or sifted sugar, and they are best eaten within a few minutes of draining.
This is a recipe written by a baking powder company, and it shows in two ways: the branded leavener in the ingredient list, and the assumption that a household has a bowl of dried bread crumbs on hand. Promotional cookbooks like the Royal series were distributed free or very cheaply from the later nineteenth century onward and circulated very widely in American kitchens, at a time when chemical leavening was displacing yeast and beaten egg in home baking. The dish itself belongs to the long tradition of bread-saving cookery, alongside bread pudding, panada and brown betty, where nothing edible left the kitchen as waste. Fritters were the useful end of that tradition, since a batter will carry almost any leftover, and the molasses in this version is the older sweetener of American home cooking, still common in cheap everyday recipes well after refined sugar had taken over the fashionable ones.