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French Fritters
Mix to a paste one pound of sifted flour with one pint of milk. Put a pint of milk in a saucepan and as soon as it boils, mix it with the paste of flour and milk; stir it over the fire until it boils, let it cook ten minutes, stirring constantly, pour it then into a good-sized bowl and leave it to cool. Beat the yolks and whites of ten eggs separately until very light (the whites should be a stiff froth), and stir them into the batter when it is cool, a tablespoonful at a time, stirring in also a teaspoonful of salt. Take for each fritter nearly one tablespoonful of batter, drop them into boiling lard sufficient to cover and fry to a light brown. Lift them out with a skimmer, and serve hot with sweet sauce.
This is a boiled flour panada enriched with ten eggs — close kin to a choux paste, though made with milk and no butter. The whole thing hinges on the batter being properly cooked and properly cool.
- The hinge: cool the paste before the eggsThe cooked flour-and-milk paste is near boiling when it comes off the heat and will scramble the yolks and deflate the whites on contact. Spread it in a wide bowl and let it come down to barely warm or room temperature before anything else goes in.
- Mixing the paste smoothThe first pint of milk and the pound of flour should be whisked to a lump-free slurry before the boiling milk goes in, and the pan wants a heavy bottom. Ten minutes of constant stirring is not padding — it gelatinizes the starch and cooks out the raw flour taste.
- Fold, do not stir, the whitesThe recipe has the eggs going in "a tablespoonful at a time." Slacken the paste first with the yolks, then fold the whites in in three additions with a spatula; beating them in flat gives leaden fritters.
- Frying mediumLard fries beautifully and holds a clean flavour, but any neutral oil with a high smoke point works. "Boiling lard" is not a measured temperature; something in the region of 340-360F suits these. Much below and the fritters soak; much above and they colour before the centres set.
- Size and behaviour in the fatA scant tablespoon per fritter is right; they puff substantially, like beignets souffles, and may turn themselves in the fat. Fry in small batches so the fat temperature does not crash, and take them out at a light brown.
- There is no sugar in the batterSweetness comes entirely from the "sweet sauce," which in period usage could be anything from a custard or wine sauce to a hard sauce or a fruit puree. A dusting of sugar over the drained fritters is the simplest modern answer.
- YieldA pound of flour, a quart of milk and ten eggs is banquet scale: expect many dozen fritters. Halved or quartered, the method is unchanged.
- Serve immediatelyThese collapse and go leathery within minutes of leaving the fat. Drain on paper, sauce at the table, and do not attempt to hold them in a warm oven.
Oscar Tschirky was never formally the chef of the Waldorf — he was its maître d'hôtel — but the 1896 Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf collected the hotel's working repertoire under his name, and it runs to over nine hundred pages of exactly this sort of professional-scale formula. "French fritters" is often taken as the period English for beignets soufflés: a cooked flour panada loosened with eggs, dropped into deep fat, where it puffs hollow from steam and from the air beaten into the whites. The technique is close to the one that underlies pâte à choux, one baked and one fried. The batter carries no sugar at all, so the sauce, chosen course by course, decides what it is.