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Raspberry Fritters
3 eggs
1 teaspoon baking-powder
½ cup water
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup flour
2 cups raspberries
Add beaten egg-yolks and water to flour sifted with bakingpowder and salt. Beat raspberries with egg-beater. Beat eggwhites to a stiff froth, fold into batter, then fold in the fruit. Drop by spoonfuls into deep fat. When golden brown, drain and dredge with powdered sugar.
A plain drop-fritter batter carrying crushed raspberries, fried and dusted with sugar. The original assumes you can judge fat by eye; a thermometer removes the guesswork.
- Fat temperature"Deep fat" is not specified; modern practice for fritters is around 365-375F. Below that the batter drinks oil and stays pale; above it the outside colors before the center of the fritter sets. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- "Beat raspberries with egg-beater"Most likely a rough pulp with seeds and juice intact rather than a smooth puree. The recipe folds in the whites first and the fruit last.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe whites are the only lift the fritter has beyond a teaspoon of baking powder. Fold the beaten whites in, then the fruit, with as few strokes as will combine them, and fry at once.
- The saltA full teaspoon of salt to one cup of flour reads high to modern taste in a sweet fritter. Half that is closer to current practice, and the sugar dredge comes only at the end.
- No sugar in the batterNone is called for, and none should be added beyond the finishing dredge; sugar in the batter would darken the outside well before the inside cooked.
- Batter consistencyThree eggs, half a cup of water and a cup of flour give a fairly loose batter, held up mainly by the stiff whites. If the crushed fruit loosens it to the point where spoonfuls spread rather than hold, work in a spoonful or two more flour.
- Draining and dredgingDrain on paper or a rack, then dust with confectioners' sugar while still hot so it clings. Dredged cold, the sugar sits on the surface and falls off.
- YieldThe quantities give roughly four cups of batter and fruit, so the count depends entirely on the size of the spoonful. They are best within minutes of frying and do not keep.
Fritters of this kind absorb almost anything: fruit, cold cooked corn, scraps of meat, all bound in the same egg-and-flour batter and dropped into fat. The Butterick book, published by a pattern company for a readership of home sewers and housekeepers, treated cooking as one more domestic craft with standard components and interchangeable parts, and the fritter batter is exactly that — a base formula printed once and varied by whatever was in the kitchen. The deep fat, in a period before thermostatic control, was judged by a cube of bread or by the way the batter behaved on contact, which is why the instruction is simply to fry until golden brown.