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Batters and Fritters
Batter I 1 cup bread flour 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains pepper 2/3 cup milk 2 eggs Mix flour, salt, and pepper. Add milk gradually, and eggs well beaten.
A plain savory coating batter, given as a base to be used with whatever the cook is frying that day. The original assumes you already know the frying and gives no yield, temperature, or timing.
- Bread flour means what it saysFarmer distinguishes bread flour (hard spring wheat, high gluten) from pastry flour throughout the book, and the choice matters here: gluten is what makes the coating cling and crisp rather than slough off. Modern all-purpose will work; cake or pastry flour will give a softer, more fragile crust.
- Measure levelAll measurements in this book are level, filled and struck off with a knife, the practice Farmer is usually credited with popularizing. One cup of flour measured that way is roughly 4 1/4 to 5 oz / 120-140 g. Two thirds cup of milk is about 160 ml.
- Order of mixingAdding the milk gradually to the dry flour, rather than dumping it in, is the whole technique for a lump-free batter without a whisk-and-strain step. Beat the eggs thoroughly before they go in or you will get streaks of cooked white in the finished crust.
- Consistency and restingThe result is a pouring batter roughly the thickness of heavy cream — thin enough to coat a dipped item and drip clear. Twenty to thirty minutes of rest relaxes the gluten and gives a more tender crust, though the original does not call for it.
- Frying temperaturePeriod books say fat is ready when it browns a cube of bread in forty seconds, which is generally reckoned to fall somewhere around 375-390F / 190-200C. Much below that the batter absorbs fat and turns greasy; much above it, the batter colors before the interior heats through.
- What it is forSalt and pepper and no sugar mark this as a savory batter -- meant for oysters, fish, cooked vegetables, croquette-style fritters and the like, rather than for apple or banana fritters.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 cups of batter, enough to coat roughly a pound of prepared food. Dry the items well and dust them lightly with flour before dipping or the batter will slide off in the fat.
This is a component recipe rather than a dish, and its bare form tells you something about how the Boston Cooking-School worked: Fannie Merritt Farmer's 1896 book was built on the principle that cookery could be taught as a set of reliable, numbered foundations that a student then applied. Hence "Batter I," numbered as one of a set and meant to be used across dozens of dishes rather than looked up each time. The insistence on level measurements and on naming the specific flour was the school's answer to the older manner of writing, which spoke of butter the size of an egg and flour enough to make a stiff batter. Frying in deep fat was a considerable undertaking in a coal-range kitchen, where the fat's readiness had to be judged by the browning of a bread cube because no thermometer sat in the kettle.