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Apple Fritters
Make a batter of one cup of milk; two cups of flour; one and one-half heaping teaspoon of baking powder; two eggs beaten separately; pinch of salt; and a tablespoon of sugar. Warm the milk, add the yolks well-beaten, and the sugar, then the flour with the baking powder sifted in, and the beaten whites. Stir well and add slices of sour apples, being careful to get the batter all over them. Drop by spoonfuls in hot lard and fry.
A straightforward drop-fritter batter from a period when "fry" meant deep fat and no one bothered to name a temperature. Two things decide the outcome: the heat of the fat and how gently the whites are folded in.
- Fat temperature"Hot lard" is unspecified; for fritters the usual modern range is roughly 350-375F. Below that the batter drinks fat and goes heavy; much above it and the outside colors before the apple inside softens. A thermometer is a modern addition the book does not ask for.
- Lard and its substitutesLard was a common household frying fat around 1900, and it gives a rich flavor and a crisp crust. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works, though the fritters will taste slightly less rich.
- "Sour apples"This means tart cooking apples, not spoiled ones. A firm tart apple such as Granny Smith or Northern Spy holds its shape and cuts the sweetness of the fried batter; a soft sweet apple collapses into the crumb.
- Fold, don't stirThe recipe says "stir well" after adding the beaten whites, which will knock out the air you just beat in. Mix the yolk batter thoroughly, then fold the whites in with a spatula until barely combined.
- Warming the milkWarm, not hot. The point is to loosen the batter and help the flour hydrate; milk hot enough to set the yolks will give you sweet scrambled egg.
- Batter thicknessOne cup of milk to two cups of flour gives a thick coating batter, which is what you want so the slices carry it into the fat. Note that the recipe stirs the sliced apples into the batter and then drops it by spoonfuls; slice them thin and pat them dry first.
- Baking powderOne and a half heaping teaspoons is somewhere around two to three level teaspoons by volume. Period powders were not all of one strength and any equivalence with modern double-acting powder is guesswork, so err low. Fry soon after mixing, since the whites and the powder both start losing lift on standing.
- Yield and servingPerhaps eighteen to twenty fritters, serving four to six. Drain on paper, then dust with sugar and cinnamon or serve with a hard sauce or a thin lemon sauce.
Fritters of this kind are old enough that the batter barely changed between the seventeenth century and the Butterick book: beaten eggs, flour, a liquid, and hot fat. What did change was the leavening. Earlier receipts relied on yeast or on nothing but whipped whites, and it is the arrival of cheap commercial baking powder in the later nineteenth century that lets this version promise a light fritter in minutes rather than after an hour's rising. The Butterick Publishing Company was a pattern and magazine house rather than a culinary one, and its cook book was aimed squarely at the middle-class household running its own kitchen without a trained cook: recipes are short, assume a working knowledge of the stove, and lean on apples, milk and eggs that were in the house already.