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Bell Fritters
This is the way they were made by the cook of that splendid steamer, the Aberbrothock, when he made them right and threw them out of the cook-house window in alarm because they swelled. 1 pint of water. 3 ounces of butter, or lard. 8 ounces of flour. 5 eggs, or 6 if small.
Make as directed for queen fritters. Good lard is preferable to bad butter. What do you do with the stale pieces of bread that are left over so abundantly, wherever there is an abundant table set and people pick and choose so? Good bread; not the rough, unshapely biscuits spoiled with inferior yellow baking bowder, top crust blistered and bottom crust soiled, so brittle and coarse that they crumble in the fingers, go down like sawdust and leave a taste of soda and salt butter in the mouth, but nice slices of white bread, good rolls, flaky biscuits, fine grained muffins. There are about three-score-and-ten needs and uses for such as these in good cooking. In half of them nothing but bread will do, in the other half bread makes a good substitote for something else, as in this receipt.
This is a fried choux paste, given in the shorthand of a trade manual that expects you to already know the method from its "queen fritters" entry. The proportions and the frying temperature are what decide whether it works.
- The hinge: dry the paste, then cool itBring the water and fat to a boil, beat in all the flour at once, and keep stirring over heat until the paste pulls from the pan sides and films the bottom. Let it cool to warm before beating in the eggs one at a time, or they scramble and the fritters will not puff.
- Weights to volumesA pint of water is 16 fl oz (475 ml), 3 oz butter is 6 tablespoons, and 8 oz flour is about 1¾ cups. Weigh the flour if you can; scooped cups run heavy and the paste stiffens.
- The proportions are lean and slackThe fat is low — The water-to-flour ratio here, two to one by weight, is close to standard for choux; what is low is the fat, three ounces to eight ounces of flour, where modern choux runs nearer equal weights of butter and flour. Hold back a little of the last egg and be ready to work in more flour if it will not mound.
- Frying temperatureFry at 350–365F. Hotter and the outside sets before the inside is cooked, leaving a raw seam; cooler and they drink fat. Well-made ones turn themselves over as they swell.
- They really do swellThey really do swell — The anecdote is not a joke; the fritters expand greatly and can split open as they cook. Drop them by small spoonfuls, no more than a few at a time, and keep the kettle no more than a third full of fat.
- Butter or lardLard fries cleaner and Whitehead prefers it to poor butter. Either works in the paste itself; for the frying fat use lard, shortening, or a neutral oil with a high smoke point.
- The baking powder asideThe baking powder aside — "Bowder" is a printer's slip for powder. The complaint about a soda-and-salt-butter aftertaste points to the alum- and soda-based leaveners of the period, which could leave a metallic edge when overdosed.
- The bread paragraphThe bread paragraph — It reads as an introduction to a receipt that followed, not to the fritters above: the text itself says bread "makes a good substitote for something else, as in this receipt." What that receipt was is not shown here.
- Yield and servingServing — The recipe gives no yield; this quantity of paste makes a large batch. Drain on paper, roll in granulated or cinnamon sugar while hot, and serve at once with a wine sauce or preserves; they are best eaten fresh.
Bell fritters were a fixture of nineteenth-century American hotel and steamboat kitchens: choux paste dropped into deep fat, where it puffs into a hollow, roughly bell-shaped ball. The same thing is made in France as beignet soufflé, also known as pet de nonne. Jessup Whitehead, who wrote The American Pastry Cook, spent his career in hotel, restaurant and steamer galleys and wrote for men in the same trade, hence the digs at bad baking powder and the story of a rattled steamboat cook pitching his ballooning fritters out the window. The closing paragraph on stale bread is a reminder of how a large table was actually run: bread left from one meal was capital, to be turned into puddings, panades, crumbs and fritters rather than thrown away.