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Fritters (Make fritters quickly and beat)
Make fritters quickly and beat thoroughly. A good rule for them is two eggs, one half-pint milk, one tea-spoon salt, and two cups flour; have the lard in which to cook them nice and sweet and hot. Clarified fat boils at about five hundred degrees -more than double the heat of boiling water-and fat actually boiling will burn to a cinder any thing that is dropped into it. The proper cooking heat is three hundred and seventy-five degrees, and is indicated by a blue smoke arising from the surface of the fat. When this point is reached, the fat may be held at that degree of heat, and prevented from burning by dropping into it a peeled potato or a piece of hard bread, which furnishes something for the fat to act on. The heat may also be tested by dropping in a tea-spoon of the batter; if the temperature is right it will quickly rise in a light ball with a splutter, and soon brown; take up carefully the moment they are done, with a wire spoon; drain in a hot colander, and sift powdered sugar over them; serve hot. Pork fritters are made by dipping thin bits of breakfast-bacon or fat pork in the batter: fruit fritters by chopping any kind of fresh or canned fruit fine and mixing it with batter, or by dipping quarters or halves in batter. The fruit may be improved in flavor by sprinkling sugar and grated lemon peel over it, and allowing it to remain two or three hours, after which drain and dip as above. Batters for fritters should be made an hour before using, as the grains of flour swell by standing after being moistened, and thus become lighter. Add the whites of eggs just before frying. It is better not to use sugar in batter, as it tends to make it heavy. Sprinkle over them in the dish when just ready to serve.
A working batter formula plus a short lesson in frying temperature, written before thermometers were common in home kitchens. The proportions are sound; the thermometry needs correcting.
- The batter, in modern measuresTwo eggs, one half-pint milk (1 cup), 1 teaspoon salt, 2 cups flour. That gives a thick drop batter, about the consistency of stiff pancake batter; add a spoonful more milk if it will not fall from the spoon.
- Rest it, then fold the whitesThis is the hinge of the recipe. Mix the batter with the yolks an hour ahead so the flour hydrates, then beat the whites separately and fold them in just before frying. Batter beaten smooth and fried immediately gives heavy, dense fritters.
- Ignore the 500-degree figureClarified fat does not boil at 500F; it breaks down and smokes well below that, and lard begins to smoke around 370-390F. The author is describing decomposition, not boiling.
- Blue smoke is too lateBy the time fat sends up blue smoke it is at or past its smoke point and already degrading. Use a thermometer and hold the fat at 350-375F. The teaspoon-of-batter test in the same paragraph is the reliable one: it should rise, splutter and colour in about a minute.
- The potato trickDropping in a peeled potato or crust of bread does not hold the fat at temperature; it lowers it briefly and gives off moisture. Harmless, but a thermostat or thermometer does the job properly.
- Fat and choice of it"Nice and sweet" lard means fresh, not rancid. A neutral fat with a smoke point above 400F gives more margin than lard, and fry in at least two inches of it so the fritters float.
- Pork frittersBacon or fat pork cut thin will cook through in a minute or two at 375F, but check that the pork is opaque and hot at the centre before serving; thick slices will not cook inside the batter shell.
- Fruit frittersMacerating fruit with sugar and lemon peel draws out juice, so drain it well and pat dry, or the batter slides off. Canned fruit especially needs blotting.
- Finishing and yieldDrain on a rack or paper rather than a colander, and sift the powdered sugar on at the last moment or it dissolves. The recipe gives no yield; a batter of this size will make something on the order of two dozen spoon-sized fritters.
Fritters of this kind sit in the long line of European batter cookery brought to America by early settlers, and by the late nineteenth century they were common breakfast and tea-table fare, cheap to make and endlessly variable with whatever fruit or scrap of pork was on hand. What marks this entry as late nineteenth century is its confidence about temperature: the period saw growing interest in the science of cooking, and cookbook writers began quoting degrees Fahrenheit even though few kitchens owned a fat thermometer and the figures were often wrong. The Dixie Cook Book, a regional adaptation drawing on the widely reprinted Buckeye Cookery, mixes practical craft with half-digested chemistry, and the surest advice in the paragraph remains the oldest kind: drop in a spoonful of batter and watch what it does.