Home › Entrées and Made-Over Dishes › Apple Fritters
Apple Fritters
1 cup milk
2 cups flour
2 eggs
1 tablespoon baking-powder
1 teaspoon sugar
Apples
Salt
To the milk add the well-beaten egg-yolks and the sugar, then the flour mixed and sifted with the baking-powder and the salt. Then fold in the stiffly beaten whites. Add sliced sour apples, being careful to get the batter all over them. Drop by spoonfuls into deep fat and fry.
A plain drop-batter fritter that assumes a cook who already knows how deep fat behaves. The recipe gives no fat temperature, no salt quantity and no yield, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- Fat temperature is the hingeFry at 365–375F. Below that the batter absorbs grease and the apple steams; above it the outside colours before the apple softens. A thermometer is worth more here than any adjustment to the batter.
- The unmeasured saltThe ingredient list says only "Salt." A half teaspoon sifted with the flour suits this quantity of batter; the original leaves the amount to the cook's judgment.
- "Sour apples"This means tart cooking apples, not spoiled ones. Firm tart varieties such as Granny Smith or Northern Spy hold their shape and keep the fritter from tasting flat.
- SlicingNo thickness is given. Rings about a quarter inch thick, cored, cook through in the time the batter needs; thick wedges will still be raw at the centre when the crust is done. Peeling is optional but the skin toughens in hot fat.
- Batter thicknessOne cup milk to two cups flour gives a thick drop batter that clings — hence the instruction to get it all over the apple. If it slides off, the apple slices are wet; pat them dry first.
- Folded whites and baking powder togetherBoth leaveners are working, so the batter will not wait. Mix, coat and fry within a few minutes or the fritters come out dense.
- Draining and finishingLift onto a rack rather than paper so the underside stays crisp, and dust with sugar or cinnamon sugar while hot.
- YieldAbout 18 to 24 fritters, depending on how much apple goes in — four to six servings as a sweet entrée or supper dish.
Butterick placed apple fritters among "Entrées and Made-Over Dishes," which says a good deal about how the course was understood in the early 1900s: an entrée was a dish served between the heavier courses, and it was also where a thrifty kitchen used up what was on hand. Fritters of this kind, batter-dipped fruit dropped into deep fat, are far older than the book and appear in English cookery from the medieval period onward under the name fritour; the double leavening here, chemical baking powder plus beaten egg whites, is the modern touch, as commercial baking powder only became a reliable pantry staple in American kitchens in the second half of the nineteenth century. The insistence on sour apples is a matter of flavour as much as thrift: a tart apple cuts the fat where a sweet dessert apple tastes flat.