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Batter IV (Teaspoons baking powder)
1½ teaspoons baking powder 3 tablespoons powdered sugar ¼ teaspoon salt 1/3 cup milk 1 egg Mix and sift dry ingredients, add milk gradually, and egg well beaten. 1 cup flour ¼ teaspoon salt 2/3 cup milk or water Batter V Yolks 2 eggs Whites 2 eggs 1 tablespoon melted butter or olive oil Mix salt and flour, add milk gradually, yolks of eggs beaten until thick, butter, and whites of eggs beaten until stiff.
Apple Fritters I
These are two of Fannie Farmer's numbered frying batters, meant to be paired with the fritter recipes that follow rather than made on their own. Batter IV is the sweetened, baking-powder type; Batter V is the lighter version leavened only by beaten egg whites.
- Missing flour quantityScrambled ingredient columns -- the lines here have run together, and a stray "1 cup flour" appears without it being clear which batter it belongs to. Do not assume either list as printed is complete; the flour allowance for Batter IV is not recoverable from this text.
- Fraction marksWhere the text reads "14 teaspoon salt" the original is one-quarter teaspoon. The same convention applies to any other bare "14" or "12" in these lists.
- Powdered sugarIn this period powdered sugar means finely granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Ordinary granulated sugar is the closer substitute.
- Which batter for whatBatter IV is sweetened and chemically leavened; Batter V is unsweetened and leavened only by beaten whites. The text here does not say which fritters take which, and the recipe immediately following is Apple Fritters I.
- Folding the whitesThe recipe adds the stiffly beaten whites last, after the yolks and butter. Modern practice is to fold rather than stir them in and to use the batter promptly, since it loses volume on standing; the text itself says only "beaten until stiff."
- Frying temperatureThese are coating batters for deep-fried fritters, but no frying instruction appears in this excerpt and no temperature is given in the original. Around 365-375F is the usual modern range for fritters.
Fannie Farmer's numbered batters are a small piece of system-building: rather than repeat a coating recipe under every fritter, she set out a short series of batters and cross-referenced them, so that Apple Fritters or Clam Fritters need only say which number to use. The two shown here mark the era's dividing line in leavening. Chemical leaveners are generally said to have displaced yeast and hand-beaten eggs in much American home baking by the 1890s, and baking powder gave a reliable, sweet, cakey coating with no technique required. The older method, folding in whipped whites, survived alongside it precisely because it produced a lighter result, and it is still the basis of the tempura-style and beignet batters cooks reach for now.