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Egg Fritters
Put four eggs into a saucepan of boiling water, boil for fifteen minutes; then take them out, plunge into cold water for a few minutes and remove the shells; cut the eggs lengthwise in halves, separate the yolks and mix them up with a little pot of meat; replace them, put the two halves together, pressing them firmly and then cut into quarters with a very sharp knife. Dip these in batter, plunge into boiling fat and fry; drain, sprinkle with salt, and serve on a napkin on a dish.
A stuffed hard-boiled egg, quartered and deep-fried — simple work, but the original leaves out the two things a modern cook wants: what "a little pot of meat" is, and how hot the fat should be.
- "A little pot of meat"This means potted meat — the seasoned, pounded meat paste sold in small crocks under a seal of clarified butter, closer to a coarse ham or tongue rillette than to canned luncheon spread. A few tablespoons of good pâté, potted ham or rillettes mashed with the yolks does the same job.
- Fifteen minutes is too longEggs held at a rolling boil that long turn the yolks chalky and ring them green with iron sulphide. Ten to twelve minutes off the heat in covered hot water gives a firm yolk that still mashes smoothly, and the cold plunge the recipe calls for stops the cooking and loosens the shells.
- Cutting the quartersThe reassembled halves are fragile. Chill the stuffed eggs thoroughly before cutting, wipe the blade between cuts, and press the filling flush so the batter has nothing to catch and pull loose in the fat.
- The batterOscar assumes a standard kitchen frying batter — flour, egg and milk or beer, thick enough to coat. It must cover every cut face completely, or the filling escapes and the fat spits.
- Frying temperature"Boiling fat" means fat hot enough to fry briskly; the book gives no figure, but the usual modern equivalent is somewhere around 350-375F. Cooler and the batter drinks fat; hotter and it colours before it sets. Everything inside is already cooked, so the fritters need only two to three minutes to brown.
- The napkinServing fried food on a folded linen napkin was standard hotel practice — it absorbed drips and kept the crust from steaming on the plate. A rack or paper does the same, though the napkin is period-correct.
- YieldFour eggs give sixteen fritters, enough for four as a savoury course or eight as an hors d'oeuvre. They are best within minutes of draining.
Oscar Tschirky's book records the working repertoire of a large American hotel kitchen at the turn of the twentieth century, and this is a thrifty item from its edges: hard eggs, a spoonful of potted meat, batter and the fry kettle. Fried stuffed eggs of this kind run through nineteenth-century French and English service cookery, where the deep-fried garnish — croquettes, beignets, fritters of almost anything bound and coated — was a way of turning cold cooked material into something hot and presentable. Potted meats themselves belong to an older preserving tradition: meat cooked down, pounded, packed into jars and sealed under butter, a standby of the English larder long before refrigeration. The instruction to serve on a napkin points to restaurant service.