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Spanish Puff Fritters
Beignets Souffles, a la Vanille.
All the preceding kinds are unsweetened and cook light colored; these contain sugar and require care to prevent their becoming too dark in frying. 1 pint of water. 7 ounces of butter. 3 ounces of sugar. 10 ounces of flour. 6 eggs, or 7 if small. 2 teaspoonfuls extract vanilla. Boil the water with the butter and sugar in it, put in the flour and make the fritter paste same way as directed for the preceding kinds, adding the vanilla with the last eggs.
Fry in good lard slowly. They may be five minutes before they begin to expand. Take them out with a skimmer; drain on a colander; dredge powdered sugar over and serve. Enough for average orders of fifty persons. Fritters glaces au rhum, or otherwise, are fritters glazed, either with a thick sugar syrup flavored with rum (a rich pudding sauce) poured over them, or else powdered sugar melted on the fritters in the manner before described.
This is fried pâte à choux — the same paste used for éclairs, dropped into fat instead of piped onto a sheet. The sugar in this version is the whole difficulty, since it browns long before the interior has set.
- Scale it down firstA pint of water with 10 oz flour and 6 eggs is a hotel batch — the book says fifty orders. Quartering it (1/2 cup water, scant 2 oz butter, 3/4 oz sugar, 2 1/2 oz flour, 1 large egg plus part of another) gives a household quantity; weigh the flour rather than measuring by cup.
- Making the pasteThe "preceding kinds" he refers to are standard choux method: boil the liquid with butter and sugar, dump in all the flour at once, and stir over heat until the paste pulls from the pan sides and films the bottom. Cool it several minutes before beating in eggs one at a time, or the eggs scramble. The vanilla goes in with the last egg as directed.
- Fat temperature is the hinge"Fry slowly" is the instruction that matters. Sugared choux wants roughly 325-335F; at ordinary doughnut heat the outside colors while the center is still raw paste. The puffs need the long, gentle heat to inflate, which is why he warns they may sit five minutes before they begin to expand.
- Lard and its substitutes"Good lard" here means clean, fresh, sweet-tasting lard rather than any particular grade. Refined lard still works; otherwise use a neutral oil with a smoke point above 400F. Avoid butter or unrefined oils, which will darken at the long frying time.
- They turn themselves, mostlyAs the puffs inflate they tend to roll over in the fat; nudge any that do not so they color evenly. Fry a small test batch and break one open — the inside should be hollow and dry, not custardy. Undercooked puffs collapse the moment they leave the fat.
- Do not crowd the panThese expand to several times their raw volume. Drop them well apart and in small batches, or they knock together and cool the fat below the working range.
- FinishingConfectioners' sugar dredged over them while still warm is the plain service. The rum glaze is a thick sugar syrup flavored with rum, poured over them; "powdered sugar melted on the fritters in the manner before described" refers back to a glazing method given earlier in the book, presumably dusting and then applying top heat.
- Serve immediatelyFried choux is at its best within minutes. It goes leathery as it sits and does not reheat well, which is why the original treats it as an order-by-order dessert.
Beignets soufflés — literally "puffed fritters" — are the fried branch of the pâte à choux family, and French kitchens made them long before they were fashionable in American ones; the same paste boiled with water and butter and beaten with eggs gives éclairs in the oven and these in the fat. What the entry really documents is the professional American kitchen of its day: the yield is quoted in orders rather than portions, fifty of them, and the author assumes the reader has already worked through several unsweetened versions of the same paste earlier in the chapter. Books of this kind were written for hotel and restaurant pastry departments, where a cook needed to know exactly why the sugared batch scorched when the plain one had not.