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Souffles Fritters
Pour one breakfast cupful of water into a saucepan, boil it up, and add two ounces of butter; when it is dissolved, put in four ounces of flour in one lump, and not sprinkled, and work the paste with a spoon until it is smooth and cooked. Remove the pan from the fire, add six eggs, beating one well in before adding another, and working the paste well against the sides of the saucepan. Have ready a deep fryingpan with a good supply of boiling fat in it, and drop in the mixture in lumps about the size of an egg. As soon as they swell and become hollow and light, remove, drain and place them on a dish with a napkin spread over it, and serve. Only a few of them should be cooked at a time, as they require much room in which to swell.
This is fried pâte à choux — beignets soufflés — and the whole recipe turns on the temperature of the fat rather than on anything in the paste. A few conversions and one correction to "boiling fat" are all it needs.
- Breakfast cupfulTake it as roughly 8 fl oz / 240 ml, though the breakfast cup was not a standardised measure and is sometimes reckoned nearer half a pint. Against 2 oz butter and 4 oz flour the proportions are workable, but they do not by themselves settle what the cup held.
- Weigh the flourFour ounces is about 3/4 cup plus a tablespoon scooped, and scooping varies enough to matter in choux. Use a scale, and add it all at once as directed — sprinkling it in makes lumps you cannot beat out.
- Dry the panadeWork the paste over the heat for two to three minutes after the flour goes in, until it forms a ball and leaves a thin film on the pan bottom. Underdried paste absorbs fat and collapses.
- Six eggs may be too manyNineteenth-century eggs ran smaller than modern large. Beat in four, then add the rest a little at a time and stop when the paste falls from the spoon in a thick, glossy ribbon; a slack paste will spread and burst in the fat.
- "Boiling fat" means moderate, not smokingThe book gives no temperature; moderate fat, in the region of 325-350F, is what these want. They need to swell slowly and cook hollow — very hot fat sets the outside in seconds and leaves raw paste in the middle. This is the hinge of the recipe.
- They turn themselvesEgg-sized lumps swell to several times their volume and often roll over on their own; nudge any that do not. Allow six to eight minutes total, and sacrifice the first one to check the interior is dry and webbed.
- Room in the panThe instruction to fry only a few at a time is not caution for its own sake. Crowding drops the fat temperature and the fritters bump each other before their walls have set.
- Yield and servingPerhaps a dozen to fifteen fritters at the egg size the recipe specifies. They are meant to be eaten hot within minutes — dust with sugar, or split and fill with jam or pastry cream; they go leathery as they cool.
Fried choux paste under one name or another has been in French pastry for centuries: the same dough baked gives éclairs and cream puffs, and dropped into fat it gives beignets soufflés, known more bluntly in the countryside as pets de nonne. The invention of the paste itself is traditionally traced to an Italian cook in the sixteenth-century French court, a story repeated in nearly every pastry manual and documented in none of them. What is not in doubt is that by the end of the nineteenth century choux was the workhorse of a hotel pastry department — one paste that could be baked, filled, or dropped in fat as the day's orders required. That is why the instructions here read as they do: a professional's proportions by weight, and the single warning that actually mattered on a busy range, which is not to crowd the fryer.