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Peach Fritters
Skin some ripe but firm peaches, cut them in halves, and take out the stones. Put the peaches in a bowl with sugar, and toss them about well, taking care not to break them. Put one pound of finely-sifted flour into a basin, and stir in one-half pint of water gradually with a wooden spoon. Beat the whites of three eggs till very stiff, mix them with the batter, and add one and one-fourth ounces of warmed butter. Put a lump of lard in a fryingpan, make it warm, but not too hot; dip each piece of peach separately in the batter, then fry them in the lard. When lightly browned, drain the peaches on a cloth, lay them on a baking-dish, the cut side downwards, sift some powdered sugar over, and glaze them under the salamander. Arrange the peaches in a pyramid on a folded napkin, placed on a hot dish, and serve.
A straightforward fritter batter with one thing working against it: the flour-to-liquid ratio as written is far stiffer than any batter that will coat a peach half evenly.
- The batter ratioOne pound of flour to half a pint of water plus three egg whites gives something closer to a dough than a coating batter. Add water gradually until it ribbons thickly off the spoon, roughly the consistency of heavy cream, and expect to use well over the stated half pint. Alternatively, scale the flour down to about 8 oz and keep the liquid as given.
- SalamanderA salamander was an iron plate on a handle, heated red in the fire and held over sugared food to caramelise the top. A broiler on high, or a kitchen blowtorch, does the same work in under a minute.
- Frying fat and temperature"Warm, but not too hot" gives no figure; for fritters of this kind a fat temperature somewhere in the region of 340-360F is usual. Lard is authentic and gives a clean crust; any neutral oil with a high smoke point substitutes. Much cooler and the batter absorbs fat; much hotter and it colours before the peach heats through.
- Butter quantityOne and one-quarter ounces is about two and a half tablespoons. Melt it and let it cool to barely warm before folding it in, or it will deflate the whites.
- Folding, not mixingThe whites are the only leavening here. Fold them into the flour-and-water paste in two additions rather than stirring, or the fritters come out dense.
- Peeling the peachesPeaches at the point of ripeness peel most easily after 30 seconds in boiling water and a plunge into ice water; a freestone variety makes the stone itself easier to remove. Firm fruit matters more than sweetness -- soft peaches collapse in the batter.
- DrainingSubstitute a wire rack for the cloth. Draining on paper or linen traps steam under the fritter and softens the crust on the side you just fried.
- Yield and servingHalf a dozen peaches gives twelve fritters, enough for four to six. The folded napkin was a common hotel presentation for fried dishes, and is generally said to have absorbed residual fat at the table. A rack-lined platter serves the same purpose without the laundry.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and then the Waldorf-Astoria from 1893, and his 1896 Cook Book is essentially a compendium of the classical French repertoire as it was practised in a large American hotel kitchen -- fritters, or beignets, occupy a long run of pages. The finishing steps here are pure hotel service rather than home cooking: dusting with sugar and glazing under the salamander, then stacking the fritters into a pyramid on a folded napkin, are the marks of a dish meant to travel from the range to a dining room in good order and look composed on arrival. Peaches were a summer luxury in New York at the time, arriving by rail from New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland, and here they are treated as a hot dessert rather than served raw with cream.