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Batter II (Core pare and cut apples)
Core, pare, and cut apples in one-third inch slices. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and few drops lemon juice; cover, and let stand one-half hour. Drain, dip pieces in batter, fry in deep fat, and drain. Arrange on a folded napkin in form of a circle, and serve with Sabyon or Hard Sauce.
Banana Fritters I 4 bananas Powdered sugar ½ tablespoon lemon juice 3 tablespoons Sherry wine ½ rule Batter V Remove skins from bananas. Scrape bananas, cut in haives lengthwise, and cut halves in two pieces crosswise • Sprinkle with powdered sugar, lemon juice, and wine; cover, and let stand thirty minutes; drain, dip in batter, fry in deep fat, and drain on brown paper. Sprinkle with powdered sugar, and serve on a folded napkin. 3 bananas 1 cup bread flour
Two fritter recipes run together here, the apple one keyed to a batter given elsewhere in the book and the banana one to "½ rule Batter V." The text as printed is also cut off mid-list at the end, so treat the trailing "3 bananas 1 cup bread flour" as the head of the next recipe rather than part of this one.
- "Rule" means recipeIn Farmer's usage a rule is a recipe; "½ rule Batter V" is half a batch of that batter. Any plain fritter batter of about 1 cup flour, 1 egg, ⅔ cup milk and a pinch of salt will stand in.
- Powdered sugarIn 1896 this was a grind between granulated and today's confectioners' sugar, and probably without the cornstarch carried by modern confectioners' sugar. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closest match for macerating; confectioners' is fine for the finishing dust.
- Deep fat temperatureThe book gives no number because temperature was judged by a bread cube. Fry at 365-375F: cooler and the batter drinks fat, hotter and it colours before the fruit heats through. Two to three minutes a side.
- Why the fruit is drainedThe sugar-and-juice maceration draws out surface liquid, and wet fruit sheds batter in the fat. Drain the pieces well and pat them dry before dipping or the coating will slide off.
- Apple choice and thicknessOne-third inch is deliberate; thicker rings stay raw at the centre in the time the batter takes to brown. Use a firm cooking apple that holds its shape rather than a mealy eating apple.
- Bananas"Scrape" means removing the fibrous strings clinging to the peeled fruit. Choose bananas that are ripe but still firm; fully spotted ones collapse in the batter.
- Brown paper and the folded napkinBrown paper was the period's fat blotter; paper towel on a rack does the job better. Serving on a folded napkin was a common presentation convention of the period; the book does not say what it was for.
- Sabayon or hard sauceSabayon (the book's "Sabyon") is egg yolks, sugar and wine whisked hot until foamy; hard sauce is creamed butter and sugar flavoured with spirit. Both are elsewhere in the book, and either wants making just before serving.
- YieldFour bananas cut this way give sixteen pieces, enough for four. The apple recipe's ingredient list is not printed on this page, so no yield can be given for it. Fritters do not hold, so fry in batches and serve as they come.
Fruit fritters were a standard sweet in nineteenth-century cookery. The maceration in sugar, lemon and Sherry is a French carryover — macérer the fruit, then coat and fry. Bananas are the more telling ingredient: by the 1890s regular steamer traffic from Central America and the Caribbean had brought them into Boston markets cheaply enough for a cooking school to treat them as ordinary, something that would not have been true a generation earlier.