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Chocolate Fritters with Vanilla Sauce
Make Queen Fritters, fill with Chocolate Cream Filling, and serve with Vanilla Sauce; filling to be cold and sauce warm.
Coffee Fritters, Coffee Cream Sauce Cut stale bread in one-half inch slices, remove crusts, and cut slices in one-half inch strips. Mix three-fourths cup coffee infusion, two tablespoons sugar, one-fourth teaspoon salt, one egg slightly beaten, and one-fourth cup cream. Dip bread in mixture, crumbs, egg, and crumbs again. Fry in deep fat and drain. Serve with Coffee Cream Sauce. Beat yolks three eggs slightly, add four tablespoons sugar and one-eighth teaspoon salt, then add gradually one cup coffee infusion. Cook in double boiler until mixture thickens. Cool, and fold in one-third cup heavy cream beaten until stiff. 2⅔ cups flour 1/3 cup sugar ⅞ cup scalded milk
Two related recipes have run together here, plus a stray line of measurements from a neighbouring page. Treat them as three separate things: a filled fritter assembled from cross-references, a set of crumbed coffee-soaked bread fingers, and a coffee custard sauce.
- The cross-referencesQueen Fritters in Farmer are a choux-type paste (cream-puff batter) dropped into deep fat, fried until puffed and dry, then slit and filled. Chocolate Cream Filling is a thickened chocolate pastry cream. Neither is printed here, so the first line is an assembly instruction rather than a standalone recipe.
- Cold filling, warm sauceThe recipe specifies it. The likely reason is contrast, and a warm filling inside a fried shell tends to soften the interior; the sauce is served warm so the plate is not uniformly cold.
- Coffee infusionStrong brewed coffee, not espresso and not a coffee extract or syrup. Brew it stronger than you would drink it, since cream and sugar will blunt it.
- The bread frittersHalf-inch slices of stale bread cut into half-inch strips give fingers about the size of a thick chip. Stale is not optional: fresh bread collapses in the soaking liquid and falls apart in the fat.
- The coating orderDip in the coffee-egg mixture, then crumbs, then egg, then crumbs again. The double crumb is a seal against the deep fat; letting each layer set before the next helps it hold.
- Frying temperature"deep fat" in this book is tested with a bread cube rather than a thermometer; roughly 375F is a reasonable modern equivalent for a crumbed, already-moist item. Cooler and the coating drinks fat, hotter and the crumbs colour before the centre heats through.
- The custard sauceYolks, sugar and coffee cooked over a double boiler thicken at about 170-180F and will curdle if the water below is allowed to boil hard. Cool it fully before folding in the whipped cream, or the cream deflates.
- The trailing measurementsThe line reading 2⅔ cups flour, 1/3 cup sugar, ⅞ cup scalded milk was checked against the printed page and matches what our text now gives. It belongs to a neighboring recipe rather than to the fritters above it.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book treats sweet fritters as a small, showy, often fried thing of the kind that once arrived after the fish and before the roast. The chapter is built on cross-reference: a handful of base preparations (choux paste, cream fillings, custard sauces) recombined into dozens of named dishes, which is why "Chocolate Fritters with Vanilla Sauce" occupies a single sentence. The crumbed bread fingers are a genteel relative of the fried-bread dishes that turn stale loaves into something worth serving.