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Bread Puff Fritters
1 pint of water or milk 3/4 pound of white bread crumbs. 2 ounces of butter. 5 eggs.
Shave all crust off the bread and crumble it fine. Boil the water, put the bread crumbs in and stir and mash to a smooth paste over the fire--five minutes--then add the butter, and when it is worked in take the paste from the fire and beat in the eggs one at a time as for other fritters. This makes a good fritter, but less certain to be hollow than others; depends on the fineness of the bread.
The next, made by a different method, is one of the most delicate preparations of the potato. But there are potatoes and potatoes. It would be labor thrown away to use any but the best flavored and mealiest for such a purpose.
This is a choux-paste fritter with bread standing in for flour: the bread is cooked into a stiff panade, enriched with butter, then loosened with eggs and fried. It behaves like pâte à choux and should be handled the same way.
- The measuresA pint is 2 cups of water or milk. Three-quarters of a pound of crumbs is roughly 6 cups of soft fresh crumbs from a plain white loaf, crusts cut away — weigh them rather than measuring by volume, since soft crumb packs unpredictably.
- Fresh crumbs, not dryWhite bread crumbs here means the soft interior of a day-old loaf rubbed or grated fine, not the dried, sandy crumbs sold in canisters. Dried crumbs will drink the liquid unevenly and give a heavy, gritty paste.
- The hinge: dry the pasteThe five minutes of stirring and mashing over the fire is what drives off water and gelatinises the starch, and it is what makes the fritter puff. Work it until the paste comes together in a single mass and pulls away from the sides of the pan; a wet paste spreads in the fat and stays solid.
- Eggs one at a timeLet the paste cool for a few minutes before the first egg goes in, or the eggs will scramble. Beat each one in until fully absorbed — the mixture will look slippery and broken at first each time. Five eggs may be more than the paste will take; stop when it falls from the spoon in a thick, glossy ribbon.
- Frying temperatureThe book assumes a kettle of deep fat judged by eye. Hold it at 360-370F. Hotter and the outsides set before the interior steam can expand; cooler and the fritters absorb fat and slump.
- On the hollownessThe author's caveat is sound. The proteins in already-baked bread are set, so a bread paste builds less elastic structure than a flour one and puffs less reliably; these are more likely to be soft-centred than truly hollow. The recipe's own explanation is the fineness of the bread, and a fine, even crumb gives the best chance.
- YieldThis is a large batch: a pint of liquid, twelve ounces of crumb, two ounces of butter and five eggs. Dropped by small spoonfuls it will make several dozen. Serve hot, dusted with sugar or with a fruit sauce; they collapse and toughen as they cool.
- The last three sentencesThey are not part of this recipe. They are the author introducing the potato fritter that follows in the book, a common linking habit in period cookbooks where recipes run on as continuous prose.
Bread panades of this kind — stale crumb boiled to a paste with milk or water, bound with eggs and fried — appear across European household cookery under many names. This one is presented in comparison with the others because the author is teaching a technique and ranking variants by how reliably they blow hollow. The instruction to shave off the crust is practical: crust fragments will not mash smooth. The aside about potatoes is a reminder that varieties were often regional and unlabelled, and a cook was expected to know a mealy potato by sight and feel rather than by name on a sack.