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Common Frying Batter
1 pint of milk. 3 or 4 eggs. Little salt. 1 large spoonful of melted butter--1 ounce. Half as much syrup. 1 teaspoonful of baking powder. 1 pound or quart of flour.
Put the flour in a pan, mix half the milk and the other in redients, except powder, together, and stir up the flour with them to smooth dough. Thin it with the rest of the milk. Beat in the powder just before using. Good for egg plant in batter, as well as fruit fritters. Spoonfuls of it fried in lard also make common fritters.
Fritters a la Creme--Breakfast Dish.
A sort of sliced custard breaded and fried, made of 1 quart of milk. 6 ounces of sugar. 6 ounces of mixed corn starch and flour. 7 yolks of eggs. 2 ounces of butter. Flavoring. Salt.
Boil the milk with the butter and salt in it. Mix the sugar in the starch and flour dry and dredge and beat them into the boiling milk. Let it cook slowly at the side of the range about 10 minutes. Stir in the yolks of eggs and take it off. Flavor with lemon, cinnamon, nutmeg or vanilla and let it get cold in a buttered pan. Roll the slices in egg, then in cracker meal, fry in lard, serve warm with syrup. Any good corn starch or farina pudding either baked or boiled when cold can be sliced and used in the same way.
Two recipes run together here: a workhorse all-purpose frying batter, and a fried custard that a hotel kitchen would have made from leftover pudding. Both are straightforward, but the measurements are trade measurements.
- The batter in modern amounts1 pint of milk is 2 cups. "1 pound or quart of flour" is the old baker's equivalence; a pound of modern all-purpose flour measures nearer 3 1/2 cups, so go by weight and hold back a little milk until you see the consistency.
- "Half as much syrup"Half the butter, so about 1/2 ounce. Any plain sugar syrup, golden syrup or light molasses will do; it would be there for browning and a little tenderness rather than sweetness.
- Add the baking powder last, and mean itThis is the hinge of the batter. The instruction to beat in the powder just before using is not fussiness, and it still applies: once wet, the powder starts working, and a batter that has stood for an hour fries flat and greasy. Mix the base ahead, aerate at the pan.
- Frying temperatureLard or a neutral oil at 350-375F. Below that the batter drinks fat; above it the outside colours before the fruit or eggplant inside has softened.
- For eggplantSlice thin, salt for 20-30 minutes and blot dry before dipping. Wet slices shed the batter in the fat.
- The custard must be cooked through and properly coldTen minutes of slow cooking with the flour and cornstarch is what sets it; the yolks go in at the end into a very hot base as the pan comes off the heat. Then it needs a genuinely cold, firm set -- spread it shallow in the buttered pan and refrigerate several hours or overnight, or the slices collapse in the breading.
- Cracker mealFinely crushed unsalted soda crackers. Fine dry breadcrumbs or panko crushed small give the same result.
- YieldThe batter is a large batch and halves cleanly. The custard, cut in 2-inch squares or fingers, would serve six to eight at breakfast.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late-nineteenth-century Chicago trade manuals written for hotel and restaurant kitchens rather than households, which is why the flour is weighed by the pound and the batter is described by what it will serve for -- eggplant one day, apple fritters the next. A single "common" batter kept on hand was simply efficient. The second recipe is a version of what French kitchens called crème frite and Italian ones crema fritta: a stiff pastry-cream set flat, cut, breaded and fried. The closing line -- that any cold cornstarch or farina pudding can be sliced and fried the same way -- suggests a use for yesterday's pudding, and the recipe itself is headed "Breakfast Dish".