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Sponge Fritters
A soft and spongy sort different from the common made with a boiled paste. 1 pint of water. 4 ounces of butter. 8 ounces of flour. 1 ounce of sugar. Boil the water, sugar and butter together, then put in the flour all at once, as if making queen fritters, and let the paste cook about 5 minutes. Then take it from the fire and work in the following and beat well: 2 ounces of flour. Half cup of water. 5 eggs Flavoring of nutmeg or vanilla. 1 teaspoonful of baking powder.
Fry spoonfuls in a saucepan of hot lard. Serve with wine or brandy sauce.
This is choux paste — the same cooked flour-and-butter panade used for cream puffs — thinned, leavened and dropped into hot fat. The hinge is the fat temperature: too cool and the paste drinks lard, too hot and the outside sets before the inside puffs.
- Fat temperatureHold the lard at 360–370F. Below that the fritters absorb grease and collapse; above 385F they brown before the interior steam has expanded and they stay raw in the middle. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- They must cook throughChoux fritters swell to two or three times their size and often turn themselves over. Give them 4–6 minutes total and break one open before frying the rest — a gummy centre means longer, cooler frying, not hotter.
- "Queen fritters"The reference is presumably to the fried choux-paste fritters known in period books as beignets a la reine or beignets souffles. The instruction "put in the flour all at once" is the whole technique: dump, then beat hard over the heat until the paste leaves the sides of the pan in a single mass.
- The unusual ratioA pint of water to 8 ounces of flour makes a wet paste by the standards of modern choux. The extra 2 ounces of flour and the eggs beaten in afterwards firm it up, though the recipe also adds a further half cup of water at that stage; expect a slack, sticky paste -- thick enough to hold a spoon's shape, no stiffer.
- Weights4 ounces butter is one stick; 8 ounces flour is about 1¾ cups by scoop-and-level, though weighing is far more reliable with a paste this wet. A pint is 2 cups.
- Baking powderClassic choux is leavened by steam alone. The teaspoon here is period insurance against a heavy fritter; it works, but add it with the last of the flour and fry promptly, since the lift fades as the paste stands.
- Frying mediumLard gives the cleanest flavour and holds temperature well. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point substitutes directly. Use a deep, heavy pan filled no more than a third — the paste bubbles vigorously when it goes in.
- Yield and servingExpect roughly 24–30 fritters from this batch. Drain on paper, roll in sugar while hot, and serve immediately; they deflate within minutes. The wine or brandy sauce is a hot custard or sugar-and-butter sauce spiked with spirits, poured over at the table.
Fried choux paste under one name or another — beignets soufflés, "queen fritters" — was a fixture of professional American pastry work in the late nineteenth century, when hotel and restaurant kitchens needed a showy hot sweet. The American Pastry Cook belongs to that world of commercial kitchens rather than the home, and the recipe assumes the reader already knows what a queen fritter is and gives no yield, no timing for the frying and no explanation of the wine sauce. The one telling modern touch is the baking powder: chemical leaveners had become cheap and universal by the 1890s.