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Fritters
Mrs. Brown.
One pint sweet milk, four eggs, one quart flour and three teaspoons Cook's Friend baking powder sifted together. Serve warm with maple syrup.
A bare-bones batter recipe of the kind community cookbooks printed constantly: the contributor assumed every reader knew what to do with a fritter batter, so the frying is left out entirely.
- The missing instructionNothing here tells you to fry, but that is what a fritter is. Drop the batter by spoonfuls into deep fat hot enough to brown a cube of bread quickly and cook until browned and set through, turning once; a batter this thick needs several minutes to cook to the centre.
- Volume flourOne quart of flour is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb. Nineteenth-century flour was scooped and often unsifted, so measure loosely rather than packing the cup. With 2 cups of milk and four eggs this gives a stiff drop batter, not a pourable one.
- A pint of milkTwo cups. Whole milk is closest to what "sweet milk" meant, the term simply distinguishing fresh milk from sour or buttermilk, which was called for by name when wanted.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Montreal baking powder brand, and the name is still found in Canada. Any double-acting baking powder can stand in at the same three teaspoons, which is if anything slightly less than the modern rule of about a teaspoon per cup of flour.
- Sift together, and mean itThe powder should be sifted through the flour before the liquid goes in. Stirred in at the end it distributes unevenly and can leave bitter pockets.
- No sugar, no saltThe batter is unsweetened by design; the maple syrup does that work. A half teaspoon of salt improves it considerably.
- YieldRoughly two dozen fritters on this quantity of batter, enough for six to eight. Once the powder is wet the batter is best fried promptly.
The Home Cook Book was compiled by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and published in 1877 in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, and is generally traced as the first Canadian fundraising cookbook of its kind and the model for hundreds that followed. Its recipes are signed with contributors' names, as this one is with Mrs. Brown. The call for Cook's Friend baking powder by brand is a notable feature, at a time when chemical leavening was still relatively new. Maple syrup as the finishing sauce, rather than sugar or a fruit compote, is one of the small details worth noting.