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Apple Fritters with Rum
Prepare a batter for fritters. Peel and core three medium, sound apples. Cut each into four even slices and place them on a plate with an ounce sugar and a tablespoon rum, mix well and let infuse for fifteen minutes. Dip the apples in the batter, turn over for a half minute, then drop, one by one, into boiling fat and fry for ten minutes, frequently turning them with a skimmer meanwhile. Lift up, drain well on a towel, neatly trim, dress on a dish with a folded napkin, sprinkle a little powdered sugar over and serve.
A French-style beignet aux pommes, written for a cook who already knows a frying batter by heart. Two things need attention: the batter the recipe declines to give, and the frying time, which is roughly double what these need.
- The frying timeTen minutes in hot fat will darken the crust well past pleasant and collapse the apple to sauce. Batter-coated apple rings of this thickness are done in three to five minutes total, turned once or twice, when the coating is deep gold and crisp.
- Fat temperature"Boiling fat" here means fat hot enough for deep frying, in modern terms somewhere around 350-375F; the recipe itself gives no number. A common test was to drop in a scrap of batter and see how quickly it rose and coloured. Much cooler and the batter absorbs fat; much hotter and it browns before the apple heats through.
- The batter it assumesAn unsweetened frying batter of about 1 cup flour, 1 egg, a pinch of salt and enough milk, beer or water to reach heavy cream consistency. A batter lightened with beaten egg white gives the lightest result; let any flour batter rest 20-30 minutes before use.
- An ounce of sugarTwo level tablespoons. It is there to draw juice from the apple and carry the rum, not to sweeten the finished fritter, which gets its sugar at the end.
- Cutting the applesFour slices from a cored apple gives rings roughly half to three-quarters of an inch thick. Keep them even or the thin ones overcook while the thick ones stay raw; a firm cooking apple holds its shape better than a soft dessert variety.
- Dry the slicesAfter fifteen minutes in sugar and rum the apples will be wet, and wet fruit sheds batter in the pan. Blot each ring before dipping.
- "Neatly trim" and the napkinTrim means snipping off the ragged tails of fried batter so the rings look tidy. The folded napkin on the dish is a grease blotter as much as a flourish; drain on paper first and the napkin can stay purely decorative.
- YieldTwelve fritters, four servings as a dessert. Dust with powdered sugar at the table, since it dissolves on standing.
Fritters of this kind are among the oldest sweet dishes still made in roughly their original form: fruit or batter dropped into hot fat appears in medieval European cookery and in the Arabic-influenced kitchens before it, and the French beignet aux pommes is the direct ancestor of what is written here. The International Cook Book (1906) was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and the phrasing gives the professional kitchen away -- the skimmer, the instruction to "dress on a dish with a folded napkin," the assumption that a fritter batter is standing ready and needs no recipe. The rum maceration is the one flourish that separates this from a plain apple fritter, and it is often said to belong to a nineteenth-century restaurant habit of soaking fruit in spirits before frying, still standard practice for pineapple and banana fritters.