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Lemon Fritters
Beat up the yolks of six eggs, together with one-fourth pound of powdered white sugar. Mix with them when beaten quite light one saltspoonful of both nutmeg and cinnamon and one-fourth pint of cream; whip in lightly the whites of five eggs whisked to a froth, and then add about three-fourths of a pound of flour, working it in as quickly and as lightly as possible; when it should form a paste only just light enough to roll out. Take the rolling pin and roll out the paste to a thickness of three-fourths of an inch. With a tumbler or a cake-cutter, cut it into round pieces and fry in boiling lard. Lay them on a warm paper to drain. Serve hot with a sauce made of the whites of two eggs beaten as stiff as possible, together with one glass of wine, the grated peel of one lemon, one-half pound of powdered sugar and the strained juice of two lemons.
The fritters themselves are a straightforward rich dough deep-fried in fat, but the sauce is a raw-egg-white foam that is never heated at any point, and that is the reason this page carries a caution.
- The uncooked sauceThe whites of two eggs are beaten with sugar, wine and lemon juice and served as-is. Nothing in that sequence brings the egg above room temperature, so any Salmonella present in the shell eggs survives to the plate; the small amount of wine and lemon acid does not pasteurise anything. If you want a foamy wine sauce, use a current recipe that either cooks the mixture over water to temperature or specifies pasteurised whites.
- Powdered sugarIn this period "powdered" sugar means finely ground granulated, not modern cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar. One-fourth pound is about half a cup by weight (115 g); the half pound in the sauce is about a cup.
- A quarter pint of creamHalf a cup. An American pint runs 16 fl oz, so a quarter pint here is 4 fl oz.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So a quarter teaspoon each of nutmeg and cinnamon for the whole batch, which is restrained by the standards of the time.
- Three-fourths of a pound of flourAbout 2 3/4 cups of modern all-purpose flour (340 g), though period flour was softer and thirstier. Add it in stages and stop at "just light enough to roll out" rather than pouring in the full weight.
- "One glass of wine"Genuinely ambiguous. Nineteenth-century wine glasses ran roughly 2 to 4 fl oz, and Oscar gives no further guide; sherry or Madeira is the likeliest intention in a Waldorf dessert sauce.
- "Boiling lard"Lard does not boil; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble vigorously when the dough goes in, in practice around 360-375F. At three-quarters of an inch thick these rounds need fat on the cooler side of that range or the outsides will color long before the centers set.
- Yield and the odd eggThe dough uses six yolks and five whites, leaving one white over; the sauce then calls for two whites, so an extra egg is needed. No yield is stated in the recipe.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and whose Cook Book appeared in 1896, was compiling as much as inventing: much of the volume gathers the standard European and American repertoire of the day into one house reference. Fritters belong to the oldest layer of that repertoire, sweet dough or fruit dropped into hot fat, and by the 1890s a hotel dessert list would carry several kinds, distinguished by their flavoring and their sauce. The lemon here is entirely in the sauce, not the dough, which is why the fritters read as plain spiced pastry on the page. Uncooked egg-white sauces of this sort, beaten stiff with sugar and fortified wine, were a commonplace finish for puddings and fritters throughout the nineteenth century and stayed in print well into the twentieth, long before anyone connected shell eggs with the risk that has since taken them off the menu.