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Pear Fritters
Take as many good cooking-pears as are required for the dish, cut them into slices lengthwise, cover with sugar, dip them in batter, plunge them into boiling oil, and fry a delicate brown. Take them out, drain, dust over again with sugar, place them on a napkin over a dish, and serve with sweet or wine sauce.
Oscar assumes a cook who already knows his frying batter and his oil temperature; the recipe is really a method, and the variables it leaves out are the ones that decide whether the fritters are crisp or greasy.
- Oil temperature"Boiling oil" is not literal; in modern terms aim for roughly 350-375F. Below that the slices absorb fat and go limp; much above it the batter colours before the pear inside softens.
- Pear choice"Good cooking-pears" most likely points to firm, slightly underripe fruit; a firm Bosc or Anjou answers well today. A dead-ripe Bartlett collapses in the batter and weeps juice into the oil.
- Slice thicknessCut lengthwise slices about a quarter-inch thick and core them as you go. Thicker slices stay raw and crunchy in the centre in the two or three minutes the batter needs.
- The sugaring stepThe first dusting of sugar tends to draw moisture to the surface, which is not what batter wants; if the slices look wet, pat them dry before dipping so the coating adheres.
- BatterNo batter is given; any plain fritter batter of flour, egg, milk and a little melted butter works, mixed to the thickness of heavy cream. Rest it 30 minutes so the flour hydrates.
- Draining and the napkinDrain on a rack or paper first — the linen napkin over the dish is presentation, not absorption, and fritters left sitting on cloth steam themselves soft. Fry in small batches and serve immediately.
- Wine saucePeriod wine sauces vary: a butter-and-sugar sauce flavoured with sherry or Madeira, or a custard or sabayon-style sauce, served warm. The "sweet sauce" alternative could be a hard sauce or plain sweetened cream.
- YieldFigure two medium pears for four people, or three or four slices each as a dessert course.
Fruit fritters were standard hotel dessert work in the late nineteenth century: cheap, fast, made to order, and a use for fruit that was firm rather than perfect. Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, compiled his 1896 Cook Book, and entries like this one read as reminders rather than instructions — the reader is presumed to have batter already made and a fat kettle already hot. Pears in particular were an autumn kitchen staple in the eastern United States, and the recipe offers a "wine sauce" alternative.