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Apple Fritters
Put half pound of flour in a deep dish and work it with beer, beating it well till there are no lumps left. Make it into a paste that is not very liquid. Peel and core some good apples, cut them into rounds, put them in the paste so that each one is well covered with it. Have a pan of boiling fat and throw in the apple slices for two minutes. They ought to be golden by then, if that fat has been hot enough. Serve them dusted with powdered sugar and the juice of half a lemon squeezed on them.
A beer batter with no leavening beyond the beer itself, which means the fat has to be properly hot or the coating turns heavy. Everything else is straightforward.
- Flour and beer quantitiesHalf a pound of flour is about 1¾ cups. Beer is added by eye — expect roughly 1 to 1¼ cups to reach a batter that coats a spoon thickly and does not run off, described here as "not very liquid."
- Which beerThe recipe just says "beer", and an ordinary low-strength table beer is the likely intent. A lager or a mild pale ale works; heavily hopped IPAs turn bitter under frying, and sour or fruit beers fight the apple.
- Rest the batterThe recipe does not say so, but half an hour of standing lets the gluten relax, giving a lighter shell. Beat out the lumps first, as instructed, then leave it.
- Fat temperature is the hinge"Hot enough" means 350–375F. Below that the batter soaks fat and the two-minute timing produces something pale and greasy; above 400F the outside colours before the apple softens.
- Cutting the applesCored whole and sliced crosswise into rings about ¼ inch thick. Thinner slices collapse; thicker ones stay raw in two minutes. A firm tart apple — Belle de Boskoop, Bramley, Granny Smith — holds its shape better than a soft eating apple.
- Two minutes is rightUnusually for a recipe of this age, the timing is accurate. Rings that thin cook through as the batter browns; longer and the apple turns to sauce inside its shell.
- "Powdered sugar"In British books of this date the phrase usually means finely ground sugar of the caster or icing type. Either works; icing sugar dissolves faster on hot fritters, caster keeps a little crunch.
- YieldHalf a pound of flour and three or four apples gives roughly 20 rings, enough for four to six people. Fry in small batches so the fat temperature does not drop, and serve at once — they soften within minutes.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in Britain in 1915 from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees who had fled the German invasion, and sold in aid of relief funds; the dishes are plain household cooking recorded far from the kitchens they belonged to. Beer batter of this kind is standard across the Low Countries, where the beer supplied both the liquid and the lift. Fried apple rings — appelbeignets in Flemish, beignets aux pommes in French — are still eaten in Belgium and the Netherlands in winter, and in the Netherlands the New Year is particularly associated with oliebollen, while Belgian fairs sell smoutebollen; the version here, dusted with sugar and sharpened with lemon, is close to what is still sold at winter fairs.