Home › The Belgian Kitchen › Puffs for Friday
Puffs for Friday
Make a batter of a beaten egg, a dust of rice flour, pepper, salt and as much cream as you can give. Roll out this batter so thinly that you can almost see through it. Cut it into rounds and put on it any cooked vegetables that you have, but they must be highly seasoned. Cold potatoes will do if they are done with mustard, vinegar, or a strong boiled sauce. Fold over the paste, press it together at the edges, and fry in hot fat.
A wartime scrap-fritter: a very lean pastry wrapped round whatever cooked vegetables are in the larder. The quantities are deliberately vague because the cook was assumed to have almost nothing.
- "Batter" means doughNothing thin enough to pour can be rolled out and cut into rounds, so the "batter" must in practice be a stiff, rollable paste. Note that the text asks only for "a dust of rice flour": any working quantity is a modern reconstruction that goes well beyond what is written, so add flour gradually to 1 beaten egg and 2-3 tablespoons cream until it just comes together.
- Rice flour behaves differentlyIt has no gluten, so the paste tears rather than stretches and will not tolerate much handling. Rest it 15 minutes before rolling, roll between sheets of baking paper, and seal the edges with a wet fingertip rather than by crimping.
- "As much cream as you can give"A 1915 Belgian household might have had a spoonful. Cream is the tenderiser here; a couple of tablespoons is plenty, and milk works if that is what is to hand.
- Season past comfortThe instruction that the filling be "highly seasoned" is the point: the casing carries only pepper, salt, egg and cream and contributes little. The text suggests cold potato done with mustard, or vinegar, or a strong boiled sauce, offered as alternatives rather than all together.
- Filling must be dryWet vegetables will steam inside and burst the seam in the fat. Drain and, if necessary, dry cooked vegetables in a pan before filling, and use no more than a scant tablespoon per round.
- FryingThe text says only "hot fat"; fat at roughly 350-375F, two to three minutes a side, until blistered and pale gold. A rice-flour paste tends to crisp without colouring much, so judge by crispness rather than colour.
- YieldSince the text gives no quantity of flour, any yield is a guess: one egg's worth of paste rolled paper-thin might give somewhere around a dozen rounds of 3 inches, enough for two as a light supper with a salad.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in 1915 from recipes gathered from refugees who had reached England, and sold in aid of Belgian relief; the shortages of that moment are legible in almost every line here " is is not a stylistic flourish. The title points to the Catholic rule of abstinence from meat on Fridays, still firmly kept in Belgium at the time, which is why the filling is vegetables. Fried filled pastries of this kind belong to a broad European family of Lenten and fast-day fritters, and the recipe calls for rice flour rather than wheat.