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Strawberry Baskets
Fry Swedish Timbales, making cases one inch deep. Fill with selected strawberries, sprinkled with powdered sugar. Serve as a first course at a ladies' luncheon.
This is an assembly recipe that leans entirely on another entry in the book: the fried batter shells made on a timbale iron. Everything that can go wrong goes wrong at the frying stage.
- The hinge: heat the iron, not just the fatThe iron must be preheated in the fat until it is as hot as the fat itself, then drained for a second before dipping. A cool iron makes the batter slide off; a wet or greasy one makes the shell refuse to release.
- Dip depth"Cases one inch deep" means immersing the iron only an inch into the batter, and never over the rim. Batter over the top edge locks the shell onto the iron and it will tear coming off.
- Fat temperatureAround 375F is the usual working range. Period books tested fat by browning a cube of bread; Farmer gives forty seconds for cooked mixtures and sixty seconds for uncooked ones, so the figure the book had in mind is not certain. Fat that is too cool leaves the shells fat-soaked and limp.
- Timbale ironSold today as a rosette or timbale iron, usually a set of interchangeable forms on a long handle. A rosette iron gives a flat wafer; you want the cup-shaped timbale form for baskets.
- Powdered sugarIn this book powdered sugar means finely ground granulated sugar, somewhat coarser than modern confectioners' sugar. Confectioners' sugar works and dissolves faster on the fruit, which is a reason to sugar at the last moment.
- Fill at the table, not in the kitchenThe shells stay crisp only briefly once cool, and strawberry juice softens them quickly. Fry and cool the cases in advance, hull the berries, and combine only as the plates go out.
- YieldA timbale batter of about one egg with half a cup each of milk and flour will make a number of small cases, though the count depends on the iron. Figure one basket per person for a first course, two if it is doing more work than that.
Swedish timbales, often associated with the irons used for rosettes, reached American cookbooks through Scandinavian immigrant baking, where the irons were long used for Christmas frying; Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book treats them as a general-purpose crisp shell rather than a holiday sweet, filling them with creamed oysters and chicken elsewhere in the book. Placing fruit in one and calling it a first course belongs to the particular world of the ladies' luncheon around the turn of the twentieth century, a daytime meal among women where the point was visual delicacy and small portions rather than substance.