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Vanilla Fritters
Pour into a saucepan one-half pint of water, two tablespoonfuls of sugar and four ounces of butter, and boil all together for a few minutes. Drop in five ounces of flour all at once, and stir the mixture over the fire until the paste is firm and smooth. Remove it from the fire, work in three eggs, one at a time, using a spoon, and beat the paste well against the side of the saucepan, Add one teaspoonful of vanilla extract with the last egg. The more the paste is beaten the more the puffs will expand in the fryingpan. Then half-fill the saucepan with hot lard. Drop in pieces of the batter about the size of eggs, and watch them swell and expand in the hot lard and become hollow and light. Only four or five can be fried at a time, because they require considerable room. The fritters, being slightly sweet, will be apt to fry too dark if the lard be made too hot, and they may remain in it as long as five minutes before they begin to swell and run over. When done remove them, and serve hot.
This is fried choux paste — the same dough as cream puffs, dropped into fat instead of onto a baking sheet. Nearly everything depends on the temperature of the fat.
- Fat temperature is the hingeStart the lard or neutral oil at about 325F, no hotter. Cold-ish fat lets the interior steam and the puff turn itself hollow before the sugary crust colors; at 375F the outside sets and darkens while the center is still raw paste. Oscar's warning that they may sit five minutes before swelling is accurate at this temperature.
- Measures in modern termsHalf a pint of water is one cup; four ounces of butter is one stick; five ounces of flour is a scant cup and a quarter, and weighing it matters more here than in most recipes. The recipe does not specify egg size; reading the three eggs as modern large ones, about 5 to 6 oz out of the shell, is a reasonable equivalent.
- Drying the pasteAfter the flour goes in, keep the pan on the heat and stir until the paste pulls away from the sides and leaves a film on the bottom, two to three minutes. Underdried paste absorbs fat and collapses.
- Beating, and why he insists on itEach egg should be fully worked in before the next. The vigorous beating against the pan side incorporates the eggs evenly and helps the paste hold air and steam, and it genuinely is what makes the puffs expand — a stand mixer with the paddle does it faster than a spoon.
- Egg-sized is largePieces that size need the full slow fry and plenty of depth. A walnut-sized scoop, dropped from an oiled spoon, cooks more evenly in six to eight minutes and still hollows out. Do not crowd; they roughly triple.
- Depth and vessel"Half-fill the saucepan" means a deep, heavy pot filled halfway with fat — the puffs must be able to roll and rise. Half-filling any pan with hot fat is a boil-over risk, so use one at least twice as deep as the fat.
- Yield and servingRoughly a dozen large fritters, or two to three times that many if made small. They are only faintly sweet as written; roll them in cinnamon sugar or split them and spoon in jam, and serve within minutes of frying, as they deflate as they cool.
Fried choux paste of this kind is French in origin, sold in English and American books as beignets soufflés and known in France by the older kitchen name pets de nonne. The trick — that the same paste which bakes into a cream puff will also inflate in hot fat — was standard in professional kitchens by the mid-nineteenth century. The recipe carries details a household book would skip: the insistence on beating the paste, the caution about the fat running too hot because of the sugar, and the blunt note that only four or five can be fried at once. Lard was the default frying medium of the period; the recipe works identically in a neutral vegetable oil.