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Beignets, Italienne
Prepare a pate a choux. Mix in a tablespoon fine sugar and a teaspoon vanilla essence. Heat well, but not to a boiling point, one quart lard in a frying pan, then with a tablespoon drop in the paste in walnut-like shape and slowly fry until a nice golden colour, which will take about fifteen minutes, being very careful to turn with a skimmer once in a while. Remove and thoroughly drain on a towel, dress on a hot dish, sprinkle with vanilla powdered sugar and serve.
A cream-puff paste fried rather than baked, which is the whole trick: the puffs must cook slowly enough to dry out inside before the outside darkens. A few notes on the vessels, the fat and the timing.
- Pâte à chouxThe book expects you to know it from elsewhere in its own pages: water and butter brought to a boil, flour beaten in off the heat until it forms a ball, then eggs worked in one at a time. Roughly 1 cup water, 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup flour, 4 eggs, with the sugar and vanilla stirred in at the end.
- One quart of lardFour cups, which gives a shallow layer in a wide frying pan and rather more depth in a narrow, deeper one; use enough that the puffs float clear of the bottom. Any neutral frying fat works; lard was a common and cheap frying fat.
- "Heat well, but not to a boiling point"Fat smokes and breaks down rather than visibly boiling, and the phrase appears to be a warning against overheating. Moderate heat, somewhere around 340F, suits these: much hotter and the shell sets before the interior puffs, so the beignets can collapse into raw-centred lumps as they cool.
- The fifteen minutesLonger than most modern fritter timings, and deliberately so at this low temperature. Walnut-sized puffs will more likely take 6-10 minutes; go by colour and by weight, since a properly cooked one feels hollow and light. Fry one alone first and break it open to check before committing the batch.
- TurningThe puffs turn themselves partway as they expand, but not reliably. A skimmer is a spider or slotted spoon; nudge them every couple of minutes so they colour evenly and stay round.
- CrowdingDrop no more than six or eight at a time. Each one drags the fat temperature down, and choux needs steady heat to inflate.
- Vanilla powdered sugarConfectioners' sugar stored a week or two with a split vanilla bean. Plain confectioners' sugar with a pinch of ground vanilla, or simply plain, works if you have not planned ahead.
- Yield and servingAbout two dozen from the quantities above. They are at their best within minutes of draining and go leathery within the hour, so fry them last and send them straight out.
Beignet is nothing more than the French word for fritter, and the qualifier italienne here points to the fritter tradition Italians know as zeppole or bignè, sold from street fryers and traditionally associated with the feast of St. Joseph on 19 March. Choux paste itself was a professional pastry-kitchen staple long before it reached domestic cookbooks. The recipe's shorthand — "prepare a pate a choux," no quantities given — is typical of The International Cook Book, which assumed a reader working through the volume rather than opening it at one page. The instruction to fry in a full quart of lard says something about the period kitchen too: fat was often strained, kept and reused, so calling for four cups of it was probably not the extravagance it now sounds.