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Plain Fritter Batter
1 cup flour 2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder Add 2 tablespoons sugar if sweet batter is desired. Sift dry ingredients together. Add beaten eggs and milk, and beat until smooth.
1 egg 1/2 cup milk 1/4 teaspoon salt
A branded baking-powder pamphlet recipe, printed with its ingredient list scrambled around the method — and with the flour left out altogether. It is usable, but you have to supply the missing line yourself.
- The flour is missingAs printed, the ingredients are baking powder, sugar (optional), one egg, half a cup of milk and salt — no flour at all. Comparable plain fritter batters of the period use somewhere between 1 and 1 1/3 cups of sifted flour to 1 egg and 1/2 cup milk. Treat 1 cup as a reconstruction, not as the book's own figure.
- Calumet baking powderCalumet was a double-acting powder of the sulphate-phosphate type; any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes measure for measure. If you have single-acting powder, get the fritters into the fat promptly, as the lift will not wait for the heat.
- "Level teaspoons"These pamphlets pushed level measure hard; before standardised measuring, a "teaspoon" could mean anything from level to heaped. Scrape the spoon flat — too much powder in a one-cup batter can leave a metallic edge.
- Beat until smooth, but not longOnce the flour is wetted, mix only until the lumps go. Overbeating develops gluten and gives tough, bready fritters rather than light ones.
- Consistency and useOne egg to half a cup of milk and a cup of flour gives a thickish coating batter — right for dipping apple rings, banana, corn kernels, oysters or cooked meat scraps. For drop fritters straight from the spoon, it should just fall from the spoon in a heavy ribbon; slacken with a tablespoon of milk at a time.
- FryingDeep fat at 365-375F. Below that the batter drinks fat and stays pale; much above it and the outside colours before the raw batter inside sets. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- The optional sugarAdd the 2 tablespoons of sugar only for fruit fritters. Sugar browns fast in hot fat, so a sweet batter will colour a shade sooner than a plain one at the same temperature.
- YieldAbout a cup and a half of batter — enough to coat two apples' worth of rings, or roughly a dozen small drop fritters.
This comes from one of the recipe pamphlets issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, the kind of booklet given away with a tin or mailed for a stamp in the first decades of the twentieth century. Their purpose was double: to teach the level-measurement method that the domestic science movement was then pushing hard, and to make sure the powder named in every ingredient list was the company's own. Fritter batter earns its place because it is one of the plainest possible demonstrations of chemical leavening — no yeast, no long beaten egg whites, just flour, liquid, egg and powder, thrown into hot fat and puffed within a minute.