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Fruit Fritters
Put into a basin two ounces of butter to warm, and mix four ounces of flour, one tablespoonful of brandy, a pinch of salt, sufficient water to make a creamy paste and work in the whites of two eggs beaten to a very stiff froth. Cut into pieces or quarters any kind of fruit, dip them in the batter and fry them in butter to a light golden brown; take them out when done, drain off all the fat, place on a dish, sprinkle over powdered sugar, and serve. The fruit should be quite ripe; if not, it should be parboiled in syrup.
A plain frying batter of the French type, leavened only by beaten egg white. The recipe assumes you know what "sufficient water" means, so a little judgment is needed at the mixing stage.
- Weights to volumeTwo ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons (half a stick); four ounces of flour is about a cup, spooned and levelled. Water to a creamy paste will likely fall somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 cup, added gradually until the batter coats a spoon and drips slowly.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe stiff whites are the only leavening here. Fold them into the cooled butter-flour base in two additions with a spatula, and fry within a few minutes. Beat them in or let the batter stand and the fritters come out flat and heavy.
- Butter will not take the heatFrying in whole butter at fritter temperature scorches the milk solids before the batter sets. Clarified butter behaves as written; otherwise a neutral oil at 350-365F gives the light golden brown the recipe asks for, and browned butter can be spooned over at the table.
- Cool the butter before the flour"Two ounces of butter to warm" most likely means softened or just melted and barely tepid. Mixed in hot, it risks cooking the flour into lumps and slackening the whites later.
- Which fruits workApple and pear rings, banana lengths, pineapple, peach and apricot quarters all hold up. Very juicy soft fruit -- ripe berries, melon -- weeps into the batter and steams rather than fries.
- Parboiling in syrupFor firm or underripe fruit, poach the pieces a few minutes in a sugar-and-water syrup, then drain and dry thoroughly on a towel. Wet fruit sheds its batter in the fat.
- BrandyOne tablespoon is for flavour and for tenderness -- alcohol inhibits gluten a little and evaporates fast, which helps crispness. Rum or kirsch is a fair substitute; leaving it out costs nothing but flavour.
- Yield and timingEnough batter for about 2 cups of cut fruit, serving four. Fry in small batches, 2 to 3 minutes a side, drain on a rack rather than paper so the underside stays crisp, and sugar them just before they go out.
Fritters of this sort -- fruit dipped in a light egg-white batter and fried -- belong to the French repertoire that shaped American hotel cooking in the late nineteenth century, where they were often sent up as an entremets or a sweet course, though the recipe itself gives no instruction as to service. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf whose 1896 Cook Book this is, compiled recipes in the terse professional shorthand of the period: a kitchen brigade needed the proportions and the sequence, not an explanation. The instruction to parboil underripe fruit in syrup is a reminder of a kitchen working with whatever the market sent that morning, well before controlled ripening and year-round shipping; the same batter, with the fruit swapped, carried a menu through the seasons.