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Queen Fritters. Beignet Souffles
Sometimes filled with pastry-cream and called beignets au frangipane. 1 pint of water. 4 ounces of butter. 8 ounces of flour. 10 eggs. Boil the water and butter together in a bowl-shaped saucepan large enough to beat the mixture in. Put in the flour all at once and stir over the fire till you have a firm, well-cooked paste. Take it from the fire, let it stand to lose a few degrees of heat, then work in the eggs one at a time with a spoon, and beat the paste well against the side of the saucepan. Fry same as the other varieties. They may be glazed by sifting powdered sugar on them and melting it by setting in the top of a hot oven, or else with a red hot salamander or shovel, held over. May be served also with raspberry vinegar, lemon juice and sugar, custard, or any pudding sauce. The receipt makes forty to fifty.
None of these fritters require any such thing as soda, or baking powder, or any substitute as is often absurdly directed; neither do the eggs require beating, otherwise than in the paste, as described.
These remarks apply as well to all the baked puffs, eclairs, talmouses, etc., of similar character.
When any of them fail to puff up as expected, it usually requires another egg in the paste. There is a certain point of softness when the paste will almost run out of a spoon, but not quite, that is the best for lightness, and is soon learned by practice.
This is choux paste — the same paste as éclairs and cream puffs — dropped into fat rather than piped onto a sheet. The book's own closing remarks are the most useful instruction on the page: judge the paste by consistency, not by the egg count.
- The hinge: consistency over countTen eggs is a starting figure, not a rule. Beat in eggs one at a time until the paste hangs from the spoon in a thick ribbon and just barely refuses to drop off on its own — that is the point the author describes, and it governs whether the fritters puff. Egg sizes vary, so hold the last one or two back and add them in halves; note that the author's own remedy for a paste that fails to puff is another egg, not fewer.
- MeasurementsA pint is 2 cups (475 ml) of water, 4 ounces of butter is one stick, and 8 ounces of flour is roughly 1¾ cups — weigh it if you can, since the water-to-flour ratio here is looser than most modern choux formulas and volume-scooped flour will throw it off.
- Frying temperature and timeThe cross-reference to "the other varieties" is missing from this page. Beignets soufflés want fat around 325–340°F: too hot and they colour before the interior sets and hollows out. They take 8–10 minutes, turning themselves as they swell, and roughly triple in size, so fry in small batches with room to move.
- Cooking the paste"A firm, well-cooked paste" means stirring over the heat until it pulls cleanly from the pan sides and a film forms on the bottom, one to two minutes. This drives off water so the paste can take the full weight of egg.
- Cooling before the eggs'Lose a few degrees of heat' means letting the paste stand until it is warm rather than steaming hot before the eggs go in; added to paste straight off the fire, the eggs scramble.
- SalamanderA salamander was an iron plate on a handle, heated red in the fire and held over food to glaze it. A kitchen blowtorch does the same job; a broiler set high works, though the fritters colour unevenly and soften fast.
- Raspberry vinegarNot a salad vinegar but the old sweetened fruit shrub — raspberries steeped in vinegar and cooked with sugar to a syrup, poured over as a sauce. A modern drinking shrub is the nearest thing on a shop shelf.
- FrangipaneIn this period frangipane means an almond-scented pastry cream, not the ground-almond filling for tarts that the word usually signals now. Fill through a slit in the side once the fritters have cooled enough to stop steaming.
- YieldForty to fifty from this quantity of paste works out at drops of roughly a tablespoon each. That is a party quantity; the paste halves cleanly, and the fritters are best eaten soon after frying, as they soften and collapse on standing.
Beignets soufflés — "puffed fritters" — are pâte à choux fried instead of baked, and French cookery texts of the nineteenth century treat them as one of the standard dispositions of that paste, alongside éclairs, profiteroles and the cheese-filled talmouse the author mentions. The English name "Queen fritters" attaches loosely to fine fritters of this kind in Anglo-American books of the period; it carries no fixed recipe. What dates this page is the argument in the last three sentences. Chemical leavening was cheap and everywhere in American kitchens, and cookbook writers were dropping baking powder into batters that had never needed it; the author is pushing back and insisting that steam and egg alone do the lifting. He is right, and the tell is his final observation about the paste that will almost run from the spoon but not quite — a working baker's description of a texture that no measurement in the receipt can convey.