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Fruit Fritters
Fresh peaches, apricots, or pears may be cut in pieces, dipped in batter, and fried same as other fritters. Canned fruits may be used, after draining from their syrup.
A stub recipe that assumes you have already read the fritter section above it. Everything hinges on the batter and the fat temperature, neither of which is given here.
- The batter it meansThis depends entirely on the fritter batter given earlier in the section: a flour, salt, baking-powder, milk and egg batter, thick enough to cling as a coating rather than run. Mix it just before frying; the baking powder starts working immediately.
- Fat temperatureDeep fat in this book was judged by dropping in a cube of bread, with a slower browning (nearer a minute) indicated for uncooked batters and a faster one for already-cooked mixtures. In modern terms fritters want roughly the middle of the deep-frying range: too cool and the batter drinks oil, too hot and it colors before the fruit inside is hot.
- Dry the fruitThis is the point the recipe glosses over. Batter slides off wet fruit, and syrup-soaked canned fruit will steam inside the coating and burst it. Drain well, then blot on paper until the surface is matte.
- Cut sizeHalves of canned peaches or apricots, or peeled fresh fruit in wedges about 3/4 inch thick. Larger pieces leave you with a browned shell around a cold center; smaller ones are mostly batter.
- Fresh pears and peachesFirm-ripe, not soft. Very ripe fruit collapses in the fat. Peel peaches (drop 30 seconds in boiling water and slip the skins) and pears, both of which have skins that toughen and separate when fried.
- Canned fruit todayBuy fruit packed in juice rather than heavy syrup, or the fritters will be cloying once sugared. Drain at least ten minutes in a sieve.
- Draining and finishingLift onto paper or a rack — never a covered dish, which steams the crust soft. Dust with powdered sugar and serve at once; they are good for about ten minutes and no longer.
- YieldA batch of fritter batter of this kind will coat roughly a dozen to sixteen pieces, enough for about four, served either in the savory-course slot the fritter section occupies or as a dessert with hard sauce or a lemon sauce.
Fritters occupy a curious place in The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book: they are often associated with the Entrées, the course served between fish and roast in a formal American dinner of the 1890s, where something small, hot and fried was expected to fill a gap without competing with the meat. Sweet fruit fritters in that slot look odd now, but the period drew a much softer line between sweet and savory in the middle of a meal. The recipe's throwaway mention of canned fruit is the more telling detail — by the 1890s commercially canned peaches and pears were cheap and reliable enough that a cook could treat them as an ordinary pantry item rather than a compromise, and the instruction to drain them is one of the small practical notes that made the book so useful to cooks working outside the fresh-fruit season.