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Portuguese Fritters
Cut six slices of bread half an inch thick, remove the crust and shape the crumb into rounds the size of the top of a tumbler, with which they can be marked out. Lay them in a dish with half a pint of milk, not allowing the milk to cover them; let them soak for half an hour, then lift them and drain for ten minutes on the side of the dish. Dip the slices of bread into well-beaten egg and fry them in butter to a rich brown. Drain, and serve with crushed loaf sugar. A little lemon juice may be squeezed over.
This is fried bread in the old style, closer to Portuguese rabanadas than to a batter fritter. The recipe is short and the details it leaves out are the ones that decide whether the rounds come out custardy or soggy.
- The hinge: shallow soakingThe instruction not to let the milk cover the bread is the whole technique. The crumb wicks up milk from below and stays firm enough to lift; submerged bread collapses in the pan. Turn the rounds once during the half hour so both faces take up milk evenly.
- Half a pint of milkOne US cup, which is barely enough to pool under six rounds in a wide dish. That is intentional. Use whole milk; skimmed milk gives a thin, watery interior.
- The tumblerA drinking glass of the period ran about 2.5 to 3 inches across the rim, so expect rounds of that size. Any glass or cutter of similar diameter works, and the trimmings are worth keeping for crumbs.
- The breadWritten for a firm, close-grained white loaf cut by hand. Modern sandwich bread is too soft and will disintegrate in the milk. Use a day-old country loaf or brioche cut a full half inch thick.
- Draining for ten minutesDo not skip this. Surface milk keeps the egg from adhering and makes the butter spit. Ten minutes on the tilted side of the dish is about right; the surface should look damp, not wet.
- Frying in butterWhole butter at the heat needed to brown bread will burn before the second batch is done. Clarify it first, or use butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, and wipe the pan between batches. Medium heat, three to four minutes a side.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar of this period was still sold in solid loaves or cut lumps as well as loose, and was crushed at home, giving irregular coarse grains. Crushed sugar cubes or a coarse raw sugar give the same crunch; granulated sugar dissolves into the surface and disappears.
- YieldSix rounds, enough for three at breakfast or six as a small sweet course. Serve immediately, as they soften within a few minutes of leaving the pan.
The name points to rabanadas, the milk-soaked fried bread eaten in Portugal at Christmas, itself one branch of a family that includes Spanish torrijas, French pain perdu and what Americans came to call French toast. All of them began as thrift: stale bread revived with milk, egg and fat, a dish recorded in European cookery long before it was anyone's national specialty. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he presided over the Waldorf's dining rooms, is characteristic of the volume as a whole, which sits between a hotel reference and a household manual and collects plain domestic dishes alongside the elaborate ones. The finishing touch of crushed loaf sugar and a squeeze of lemon is the tell of a nineteenth-century kitchen, where sugar might still arrive in solid form to be broken down by hand and citrus was the ordinary corrective to richness.