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Orange Fritters
Peel two oranges and separate into sections. Make an opening in each section just large enough to admit of passage for seeds, which should be removed. Dip sections in Batter II, III, IV, or V, and fry and serve same as other fritters.
A fragment of a recipe that assumes you have the fritter-batter numbers and the deep-fat instructions from elsewhere in the book. Most of the work is in preparation, not cooking.
- The batters it refers toBatters II through V are numbered batter recipes given elsewhere in the book; the recipe itself tells you nothing about them beyond the numbers, and the choice of four suggests they are interchangeable here rather than identical. Any standard fritter batter of pouring-cream thickness will stand in; a thin batter slides off the segments in the fat.
- Dry the fruit, or nothing sticksThis is the hinge. Orange sections are wet and the cut opening leaks juice. Blot the segments thoroughly on a towel and leave them to air-dry for a few minutes before dipping, or the batter will slip away and the moisture will make the fat spit violently.
- Seedless orangesThe instruction to cut an opening for the seeds is largely obsolete; navel oranges and most supermarket varieties are seedless. Peeling the segments free of their membranes gives a better result, though it makes them fragile.
- Fat temperature"Fry same as other fritters" sends you to the book's general deep-fat method, which is judged by eye rather than by thermometer. In modern terms roughly 370-375F works: below that the batter absorbs grease; above it the coating browns before the fruit inside heats through. Fry only a few at a time so the temperature does not crash.
- Cooking timeTwo to three minutes, turning once, until evenly golden. The orange is not being cooked so much as warmed, and long frying collapses the segment into juice inside its shell.
- Draining and servingThe book drains fritters on brown paper; paper towels or a rack over a tray work better. Dust with powdered sugar and serve at once — they turn soggy within a few minutes.
- YieldTwo oranges give roughly twenty segments, enough for four small servings.
Fritters of all kinds, sweet and savoury, filled a regular slot in late-Victorian menus because they were cheap, quick and could be made from almost anything on hand; the same part of the book runs through apple, banana, corn and clam versions. The compressed cross-referencing here, sending you off to "Batter II, III, IV, or V," is characteristic of the book's method: Farmer taught a set of base preparations once and then treated them as building blocks, an organising idea that helped make the volume a standard for decades. Oranges arriving by rail from Florida and California as those industries expanded through the 1880s and 1890s were not an everyday item in a Boston winter, which is part of why a dish this simple was worth printing at all.