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Apple Fritters
Make plain fritter batter as above. Take four large, sound apples; peel, core and quarter. Dip each quarter in batter, and fry to light brown in smoking hot lard. Each fritter will at first sink to the bottom of the kettle; then as the heat starts baking powder into action and dough begins to swell, it will rise to surface, and should be gently turned, the turning to be repeated until fritter is finely colored. Most fritters are done within 5 minutes, time needed to cook them being determined by one which should be cooked as a tester.
A straightforward deep-fried fritter that depends entirely on fat temperature and on cutting the apple thin enough to cook through before the crust darkens. The recipe assumes you have the book's plain fritter batter already made.
- Fat temperature"Smoking hot lard" is the one instruction not to take literally — lard's smoke point is around 370F, varying with how it was rendered and refined, and fat pushed past it breaks down and tastes acrid. Hold the fat at 350-365F on a thermometer; the fritter should sizzle steadily and rise within twenty seconds or so.
- Quarters are too thickA raw apple quarter will not soften in the five minutes given, so the batter browns around a crunchy core. Cut rings about 1/4 to 3/8 inch thick, or eighths at most, and the timing in the recipe works as written.
- The testerFrying one fritter first as a tester is sound practice and worth keeping; the recipe does not say to cut it open, but that is the obvious way to judge it. It calibrates both your fat temperature and your apple thickness before you commit the rest of the batch.
- Lard and its substitutesLard was the standard frying fat of the period and gives a clean flavour. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point — peanut, sunflower, refined canola — behaves much the same way at these temperatures.
- Apples"Large, sound" meant firm and unbruised. A tart, dense variety that holds shape — Granny Smith, Braeburn, Northern Spy — beats a mealy eating apple, which collapses into sauce inside the shell.
- Baking powderThe batter's lift comes from chemical leavening reacting in the hot fat. Mix the batter shortly before frying; if it stands an hour the rise is weaker and the fritters stay heavy and sink-prone.
- Kettle and quantityThe "kettle" is a deep, heavy pot, not a modern tea kettle. Fill it no more than a third with fat, fry four or five pieces at a time so the temperature does not crash, and drain on a rack rather than paper so the underside stays crisp.
- Yield and servingFour apples cut into rings gives roughly 20 to 24 fritters, enough for four to six. Serve hot, dusted with sugar and cinnamon or with a spoonful of syrup — they go soft within twenty minutes.
Fritters — batter-dipped fruit fried in deep fat — are among the oldest sweet dishes in the English kitchen, appearing in medieval manuscripts long before baking powder existed, when the batter was raised with ale barm or yeast. The version here is generally associated with the turn-of-the-century American household: chemical leavening had made a quick batter possible without waiting for a rise, and cheap rendered lard made deep frying an everyday operation rather than an occasion. Books of this era, aimed at the cook working without thermometers, taught fat temperature by sign rather than number — smoking fat, a bread cube browning, the fritter rising to the surface — and the instruction to fry one piece as a tester is the practical heart of that tradition.