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Queen Fritters
1/4 cup butter (scant) ½ cup boiling water 1/2 cup flour 2 eggs Fruit preserve or marmalade Put butter in small saucepan and pour on water. As soon as water again reaches boiling-point, add flour all at once and stir until mixture leaves sides of saucepan, cleaving to spoon. Remove from fire and add eggs unbeaten, one at a time, beating mixture thoroughly between addition of eggs. Drop by spoonfuls and fry in deep fat until well puffed and browned. Drain, make an opening, and fill with preserve or marmalade. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and serve on a folded napkin.
This is fried choux paste — the same dough as cream puffs, dropped into deep fat instead of baked. The recipe is short because Fannie Farmer assumed her readers already knew cream-puff paste from elsewhere in the book.
- The hinge: dry the pasteAfter the flour goes in all at once, keep stirring over heat until the mass balls up and pulls cleanly from the pan sides, leaving a faint film on the bottom. Paste that is still wet will not puff and will soak up fat.
- Fat temperatureThe original says only "deep fat." A moderate fat, in the region of 350-360F, suits them: hotter and the outsides brown before the centres set; cooler and the fritters absorb grease and collapse. They will roll over and swell as they cook, taking several minutes.
- Scant 1/4 cup butterRoughly 3 1/2 tablespoons, about 50 g. The proportion matters less than the flour-to-liquid ratio, so measure the water and flour accurately.
- Eggs unbeaten, one at a timeThis is deliberate. Adding the eggs whole and beating hard between each lets you feel when the paste has taken up all it can hold. Eggs of the period were often smaller than a modern large egg, so if the second egg makes the mixture loose enough to run off the spoon, hold back part of it.
- Hollow centresWell-puffed fritters should be nearly hollow. Split one from the first batch to check — if the inside is still raw dough, lower the fat temperature and cook longer.
- Powdered sugarIn period usage this named a fine-ground sugar; modern confectioners' sugar is the nearest substitute. Dust after filling and just before serving, or it dissolves into a glaze.
- Yield and servingPerhaps a dozen small fritters. They are best eaten warm; fried choux softens quickly and does not reheat well. The "folded napkin" is a period serving convention -- a linen napkin in the dish absorbs residual fat.
Despite their place in the "Entrées" chapter, Queen Fritters are a sweet — a reminder that in late nineteenth-century American service the entrée was a course of made dishes between the fish and the roast, and could as easily be sweet as savoury. The dough itself is pâte à choux, generally traced to Italian and then French court cookery and long established in English and American books as "cream cake mixture" or "cream-puff paste." Fried rather than baked, it belongs to the same family as French beignets soufflés and the savoury pommes dauphine.