Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Fritters (Mrs Issac Shannon Two eggs two)
Fritters (Mrs Issac Shannon Two eggs two)
Mrs. Issac Shannon, Two eggs, two cups sour milk, one teaspoon sugar, four tablespoons butter, flour to thicken, fry in pans, with lard.
A terse nineteenth-century batter recipe of the sort written down for cooks who already knew what fritters should look like. Two things need decoding: the missing leavening and the missing quantity of flour.
- The sour milk needs sodaThe sour milk implies soda -- Sour milk in this period was commonly the acid half of a chemical leavening pair, and comparable batters of the era usually call for saleratus (baking soda), which this writer has not recorded. Without it the batter is simply acidic and flat. Period recipes generally reckon about half a teaspoon of soda per cup of sour milk.
- Sour milk itselfThis meant raw milk left to clabber naturally, which today's pasteurised milk will not do safely or pleasantly. Buttermilk is the standard substitute, cup for cup; plain kefir or thinned yogurt behaves the same way against soda.
- "Flour to thicken"Genuinely ambiguous. For a spoon-dropped fritter you want a batter that mounds on the spoon rather than runs; with two cups of liquid plus two eggs that will take a good deal of flour, and the quantity cannot be recovered from the text. Add it in stages and stop when the batter holds its shape.
- A teaspoon of sugar is not sweeteningOne teaspoon in this volume of batter cannot sweeten it; it more likely aids browning. Fritters this plain were generally eaten with syrup, molasses or a sauce at the table, or served alongside meat rather than as dessert.
- "Fry in pans, with lard"This reads as shallow frying in a skillet rather than deep frying; the fritters are dropped by spoonfuls into a shallow layer of hot fat and turned once. Lard holds up well at frying heat and gives a clean flavour; a neutral high-smoke-point oil substitutes directly. Moderately hot fat, in the region of 350-375F, keeps them from soaking.
- Butter quantityFour tablespoons of butter in this volume of batter is generous and makes for a tender, rich fritter that browns fast; the recipe does not say whether it is melted or worked in. Watch the heat, since butterfat in the batter darkens the exterior before the centre is set.
- YieldDepends entirely on how much flour is added, so no firm count can be given from the text. Cook one first as a test and adjust flour or fat temperature before committing the batch.
Fritters of this kind — a soured-milk batter, spooned into hot fat, no fruit and no name beyond the word itself — were everyday griddle-adjacent cooking in North American households through the nineteenth century, and community cookbooks like The Home Cook Book collected them by the dozen under contributors' names. The recipe's brevity is the point: it gives the proportions and little else. Its reliance on sour milk marks the era before commercial baking powder had fully displaced the older system of pairing an acid dairy product with saleratus, a technique that also gave a household a use for milk that had begun to turn. Compiled in Toronto in the 1870s and sold to raise funds for a hospital, the book is often described as one of the earliest Canadian examples of the subscription cookbook, a genre in which recipes appeared under the names of the women who contributed them.