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Fried Puff Borders
For individual entrees. Suitable to serve instead of Yorkshire pudding with any roasted or braised meat having a brown gravy.
Make either the corn starch fritter paste or the queen fritter paste next following. Put it in the lady-finger sack and press out in piping smaller than a little finger, on to a greased tin lid or a baking pan of small size. Form the piping into oval rings the size required for your individual dishes. When the frying fat is ready, turn the lid upside down with the rings on it and dip them in the fat. They will immediately slip off and retain their shape while frying, but puff considerably. Where many are wanted at once, a baking pan does best to fry in, a smaller sized tin pan that will go down in it being used to make the shapes on. Instead of forcing sack and tube, a half sheet of stiff paper, made into a cornet, pinned, and the point cut off, will do. Serve hot, with the meat in the centre and gravy in the dish. The two following are the kinds that they made so elegantly at Long Branch. Beignet is the French word for fritter. Souffle is puff. Souffle is puffed. Perhaps puffed fritter would be better English than puff fritter, but common usage seems to sanction the latter.
This is a construction method rather than a full formula — the paste itself comes from one of the two fritter recipes that follow it in the book. What is unusual, and worth getting right, is the trick of piping onto a tin lid and inverting it into the fat.
- The hinge: let the fat release themThe rings are piped onto a greased tin and lowered face-down into hot fat so they float free without being handled. If the tin is dry the piping sticks and tears; if the fat is not hot enough the paste slumps off the tin in a puddle. Grease well, and do not try to lift the rings with a spatula.
- Frying temperatureNo temperature is given; "when the frying fat is ready" is left to the cook's judgement. Fat hot enough to set the surface on contact -- conventionally in the region of 350-375F for fritters -- suits a paste of this kind; much hotter and the exterior colours before the inside expands and dries.
- Lady-finger sack and tubeA cloth or canvas piping bag with a plain round tip. Whitehead's own alternative -- a cone rolled from stiff paper with the point snipped -- works, and so does a modern piping bag with a 1/4 to 3/8 inch plain tip. "Smaller than a little finger" is roughly that; the recipe notes the rings puff considerably in the fat.
- What the paste isThe two pastes he points to are given on the following pages, one made with corn starch, the other the "queen" fritter paste; their composition is not stated here. Whatever the formula, it must be stiff enough to hold a piped line on the tin without spreading.
- VesselsA "tin lid" is simply a flat sheet of tin small enough to handle. Modern equivalent: an inverted small sheet pan or a metal pie plate. His large-batch version — piping on a small pan and inverting it into a bigger pan of fat — needs a deep pan and considerable oil; a wide dutch oven is the practical substitute.
- ServingMeant as a frame for a savoury course: hot meat in the centre, brown gravy pooled in the dish around the border. The paste itself is not described on this page. They will soften once gravy touches them, so fry and plate at the last minute.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to Jessup Whitehead's series of manuals written for hotel and restaurant kitchens rather than households, which is why the instructions are concerned with turning out many identical portions at speed and with improvising equipment — a paper cornet instead of a forcing bag, a small pan inverted into a large one. Long Branch, New Jersey, invoked here as the place they were made "so elegantly," was one of the great American seaside resorts of the 1870s and 1880s, a summer address for presidents and a training ground for hotel cooks, and Whitehead cites it the way a later writer might cite a famous restaurant kitchen. The closing note on beignet soufflé is characteristic of the period's cookbooks: American professional cooking ran on a French vocabulary that most of its practitioners had learned by ear, and authors regularly stopped to translate, in this case arguing himself to a draw over whether "puff fritter" or "puffed fritter" is better English.