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Fruit Fritters
Peel some apples, take out the core and cut them in slices, powder them on each side with sugar. You can use also pears, melons, or bananas. Make a batter with flour, milk and eggs, beating well the whites; a glass of rum and sugar to sweeten it. Put your lard on to heat, and when the blue steam rises roll your fruit slices in the batter and throw them into the lard. When they are golden, serve them with powdered sugar.
The original assumes you know a fritter batter by heart, so the quantities are missing. Everything else in it is sound; the only real judgement calls are the batter consistency and the fat temperature.
- A workable batterFor four servings, about 1 cup flour, 2/3 cup milk, 2 egg yolks, a tablespoon of sugar and a tablespoon of rum, with the 2 whites whipped to soft peaks and folded in last. It should coat a slice of apple thickly enough to hide it but still run off the edge.
- "When the blue steam rises"The old signal that the frying fat is genuinely hot rather than merely warm. In modern terms this is somewhere around 350-375F; a thermometer is easier. Much cooler and the batter soaks up fat, much hotter and the outside browns before the fruit softens.
- Lard, or notThe recipe calls for lard, but any neutral oil with a high smoke point works. You need enough depth for the fritters to float, at least 2 inches.
- Sugaring the fruit firstPowdering the slices with sugar on both sides draws out a little juice and helps the batter grip. Do not do it more than ten minutes ahead or the slices weep and the batter slides off.
- Cut thicknessApple and pear slices want to be about 1/4 inch, cored into rings if you like. Banana can go thicker; melon is very wet and should be blotted dry before battering or it will steam the coating loose.
- Fold the whites lateThe beaten whites are what makes these light rather than leaden, and they collapse on standing. Fold them in just before frying and use the batter within about fifteen minutes.
- Draining and servingLift onto a rack rather than paper -- paper traps steam and softens the underside. Dust with icing sugar at the table; sugar applied too early dissolves into a syrup.
- YieldAbout 16 to 20 fritters from two large apples, serving four as a dessert. Fry in batches of four or five so the fat temperature does not crash.
Fried fruit in batter is an old sweet in the Low Countries, and Belgian and Dutch cooks have long treated beignets or appelbeignets as carnival and New Year food, made in quantity in deep fat alongside doughnuts and oliebollen. The book belongs to the First World War Belgian relief effort, gathering recipes contributed by Belgian cooks and refugees, which helps explain the loose, conversational form of the instructions -- these read as dictated household habits rather than tested formulas, and the writer expected the reader to already know what a fritter batter looked like. The suggestion of melon and banana alongside apples and pears shows imported fruit was within reach of the contributors' kitchens, while the glass of rum in the batter reflects the continental habit of using spirits in fried doughs.