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Spinach Fritters
Take-any cold boiled spinach--though people generally eat all that there is--and mix it thickly with the yolk of egg and a little rice flour; you may add a little powdered sugar. Have ready some boiling fat, and drop spoonfuls of the spinach into it. If the fat is hot enough the fritters will puff out. Drain them quickly and serve very hot.
A thrift recipe for leftover greens, written with the assumption that the cook already knows how deep fat behaves. The whole thing hinges on how dry the spinach is before it meets the egg.
- Squeeze the spinach hardBoiled spinach holds an enormous amount of water, and wet batter will neither hold its shape nor puff. Wring it in a clean towel or press it in a sieve until it feels almost dry, then chop it fine.
- Quantities are unstatedNothing here is measured. For roughly a cup of cooked, squeezed spinach, start with one yolk and a tablespoon or two of rice flour, adding flour until the mixture holds on a spoon without slumping.
- Rice flourOrdinary fine white rice flour, not the sweet glutinous kind sold for mochi. It fries crisper and less bready than wheat flour; plain wheat flour will work but gives a softer fritter.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature, only the test that the fritters puff. Modern deep-frying practice for this kind of drop fritter is roughly 350-375F: cooler and the spoonfuls absorb fat and sit flat, much hotter and the outside colours before the egg inside sets.
- The sugar is optional and smallA teaspoon at most; the recipe itself calls it only 'a little powdered sugar', and a heavy hand makes the fritters taste like a failed dessert.
- Frying in batchesDrop no more than five or six spoonfuls at a time so the fat does not drop in temperature. Turn them once if they float, and lift them out when evenly golden, about two to three minutes.
- Yield and servingA cup of cooked spinach gives roughly a dozen small fritters, enough as a side for three or four. They collapse and soften as they cool, so they genuinely need to go straight from the drain to the table.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in 1915 from recipes gathered from Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion, and the book's proceeds went to relief work. That origin shows in a recipe like this one: it begins with leftovers, uses one egg yolk, and turns a handful of cold greens into a hot dish. The aside that "people generally eat all that there is" reads as a joke about spinach. Frying vegetable pur\em>beignets was long-established practice in French and Belgian home cooking; the light dusting of sugar on a savoury green belongs to an older tradition that kept sweet and savoury far less strictly separated than modern cooking does.