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Parmesan Fritters with Apples
1/2 pint of water. 1 ounce of butter. 4 ounces of flour. 4 ounces of cheese. 5 or 6 eggs.
Grate the cheese, if dry enough, or else mince it extremely small. Make the puff fritter paste by boiling the water with the butter in it and then stirring in the flour.
When well cooked take the saucepan from the fire, add the grated cheese and beat it into the hot paste with a pestle. Then work in the eggs one at a time and beat the mixture for several minutes. Fry smal fritters. They swell very much and are not good if dark colored. When done, drain them--on paper if necessary--open each one with a twist of a fork, and put in a teaspoonful of dry-stewed apple seasoned with fresh butter. When the cheese is of a very dry sort, a little more butter is needed to make the paste. The receipt preceding and the next to follow have been rehabilitated from some of those delightfully vague instructions for making Italian or other dishes, which say, "take a glass of water and a handful of cheese and a pounded anchovy, and some flour, and eggs enough to make a paste not too thin, etc" The anchovy is for flavor and can be added or not, at pleasure.
This is choux paste enriched with grated Parmesan, fried rather than baked, then split and filled with a thick apple compote. It behaves exactly like the beignets soufflés of French pastry work, which means the frying temperature matters more than anything else in the list.
- The measurements in modern termsHalf a pint of water is 1 cup; 1 ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; 4 ounces of flour is a scant cup (113 g, best weighed); 4 ounces of Parmesan grated fine comes to roughly 1 1/4 cups loosely packed.
- EggsEggs in older receipts were ungraded and often smaller than today's large eggs, so five or six may be more egg than you need. Add them one at a time as instructed and stop when the paste falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon and holds a soft peak — often four to five large eggs. A slack paste spreads in the fat instead of puffing.
- The hinge: fry at 340-350FThe hinge: moderate fat -- "They swell very much and are not good if dark colored" is the whole technique. Fat that is too hot sets and browns the outside before the interior expands and cooks, leaving a raw, eggy center; start in moderately hot fat rather than hot. Drop small spoonfuls and allow several minutes; they swell greatly and often turn themselves as they inflate.
- Dry the paste properly"When well cooked" means stirring the flour paste over the heat for two or three minutes until it pulls together into a smooth ball and leaves a film on the pan bottom. Underdried paste will not hold enough egg.
- Beat it with a pestleThe pestle was for working stiff hot paste in a saucepan. A sturdy wooden spoon does the job, or the paddle of a stand mixer on low, which also cools the paste enough that the first egg does not scramble.
- "Dry-stewed apple"A thick apple compote cooked down until no liquid pools — closer to a stiff apple butter than applesauce. Any moisture will steam inside the fritter and collapse it. Season it with fresh butter, as the recipe says.
- CheeseThe recipe specifies only "cheese", dry enough to grate; a hard aged grating cheese such as Parmigiano-Reggiano or Grana Padano suits it. The note about adding more butter for a very dry cheese is sound: a drier, older cheese brings less fat of its own to the paste.
- Yield and servingAbout 30 small fritters. They are best within minutes of frying, while the shell is still crisp and the interior hollow; filled fritters do not hold.
- The anchovyThe closing paragraph refers to the receipt before and the one after, so the anchovy may belong to those rather than to this one; the text is not explicit. If you do add a pounded anchovy, it will pull the fritter towards a savory dish.
Fried choux of this kind is old and widespread: the same paste that becomes éclairs and gougères in the oven becomes beignets soufflés in the fat, and Italian usage knows it as bignè. What makes this entry worth reading is the author's own admission at the end — that the recipe was "rehabilitated" from the sort of vague continental instruction that says take a glass of water and a handful of cheese. Pinning such dishes to ounces and pints was a recurring project of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookbook writers. The cheese-and-fruit pairing here — salty grating cheese, buttered stewed apple inside — is an older habit than the recipe's tidy weights suggest, and it survives in the Italian custom of eating apples or pears with hard grating cheese.