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Jersey Wonders
Work together with a tablespoon before the fire one-fourth pound of powdered sugar with one-fourth pound of the best butter until they are well incorporated. Beat up thoroughly four eggs and add these to the sugar and butter. Sift in by degrees one pound of white flour and a grating of nutmeg. Knead this together for some time, cover it with a cloth and set it in a warm place; then cut up the mass into small pieces about the size of an apple, roll them round in the hand to prevent them sticking and then roll out each ball on a floured paste-board to an oval about one-third to one-half inch in thickness. Cut with a floured knife three parallel slits in the middle of each, but not through at the ends, cross the two slips with your fingers and draw up the two sides between. Put your fingers through and drop each wonder into a dish of boiling lard. They will rise as they are done and can then be turned so as to brown them all over equally. Remove them with a fork and lay them on a drainer or folded paper to drain. A slight sprinkling of powdered sugar improves them.
An unleavened enriched dough, twisted and deep-fried — the traditional Channel Islands mèrvelle. The whole thing hinges on frying temperature and on rolling the dough thin enough that the centre cooks before the outside colours.
- Fat temperature"Boiling lard" means fat at about 350–360F, not literally boiling. Below that the dough absorbs grease and stays pale; much above it and the outside browns while the inside is still raw dough. Use a thermometer and let the fat recover between batches.
- Working before the fireThis only means softening the butter to creaming consistency. Butter at 65–68F creams with the sugar in a couple of minutes in a stand mixer; do not melt it, or the dough will be slack and greasy.
- Powdered sugarIn this period powdered sugar usually meant granulated sugar crushed fine, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closer match for the dough; keep true confectioners' sugar for the dusting at the end.
- The warm restThere is no yeast or chemical leavening here, so the rest is not a rise — it relaxes the gluten after kneading and makes the dough roll out without springing back. Thirty minutes in a warm room is enough; the fridge works too, just allow longer.
- "The size of an apple"Taken literally this gives very large wonders from a pound of flour. Traditional versions are palm-sized, roughly 2 oz of dough each, which gives around 14–16 pieces; scale to whatever your pan can fry without crowding.
- Rolling and the twistOne-third to one-half inch is thicker than many modern versions, which go closer to a quarter inch. The recipe's own method is three slits, then cross the two slips and draw the two sides up between them; a common alternative is to pull one end of the oval through the middle slit. Either way the crossed strands are what makes the finished shape open out in the fat.
- Draining and servingDrain on a rack rather than flat paper so steam escapes and the undersides stay crisp. Dust with sugar while still warm and eat the same day; like most fried doughs they toughen quickly once cold.
- Fat choiceLard gives the traditional flavour and a clean, short crust. Any neutral fat with a high smoke point will fry them, but the taste changes noticeably.
Jersey Wonders — mèrvelles in Jèrriais — belong to the Channel Islands rather than to New Jersey. The dough is essentially a rich, unleavened biscuit paste that puffs from steam alone when it hits hot fat, a family of fried sweets found all over Europe, including the Italian cenci. The distinctive twist is not decorative: cutting and threading the dough opens up the piece so it fries evenly and swells rather than staying dense. Jersey households are traditionally said to have fried wonders only on an outgoing tide, on the belief that fat cooked on a rising tide would boil over — a piece of folklore usually reported as a saying rather than a practice with any documented origin.