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Cream Fritters, Strawberry Sauce
Have one and a half pints cold milk in a saucepan with four ounces sugar and a teaspoon vanilla essence; place the pan on the fire and boil for five minutes. Dilute one and a half ounces of corn starch in one gill cream and add to the milk, then briskly stir with the wooden spoon while boiling for three minutes; add two egg yolks, mix while cooking for two minutes more. Remove from the fire, pour the preparation into a lightly buttered tin and let cool off. Turn the preparation upon a lightly buttered part of the table, then cut into twelve even lozenge pieces. Dip each piece in beaten egg, then lightly roll in fresh bread crumbs; place in a frying basket and fry in boiling fat for ten minutes. Remove, drain on a towel, dredge two tablespoons powdered sugaroverthem. Dress on a hot dish. Pour a strawberry sauce around the fritters and serve.
This is fried pastry cream — a stiff cornstarch custard set firm, cut, breaded and deep-fried. It works, but two of the original instructions will defeat you if followed literally.
- The hinge: chilling"Let cool off" understates it. The custard must be spread about 3/4 inch thick and refrigerated until completely cold and firm, at least four hours and preferably overnight. Cut warm or merely cool, it will slump and leak into the fat.
- Frying timeTen minutes is far too long for a breaded piece of set cream; the crust burns and the interior liquefies and bursts. At 375F these need about 2 minutes, just until deep gold, turning once if they float.
- "Boiling fat"Fat does not boil at frying temperature — the phrase means fat hot enough to hiss and bubble at the edge of the food, roughly 360-375F. A frying basket is convenient but not required; a spider or slotted spoon lifts them just as well.
- UnitsA gill is half a cup. The ounces are weights, not fluid: 4 oz sugar is a generous 1/2 cup, and 1 1/2 oz cornstarch is about 5 tablespoons. One and a half pints of milk is 3 cups.
- The buttered tableRather than turning the custard out onto the table itself, use a buttered or parchment-lined sheet pan, and level the custard with an offset spatula so the lozenges come out even.
- BreadingEgg-and-crumb once as written is thin protection for something this soft. Flour lightly, then egg, then crumbs, and chill the breaded pieces 20 minutes before frying so the coating sets.
- The strawberry sauceNo recipe is given, which was common in books of this kind. Most likely it would have been crushed or sieved strawberries with sugar, perhaps warmed briefly and thinned with a little water or syrup, rather than a thickened sauce.
- YieldTwelve lozenges, so four to six servings as a dessert. Fry in two batches and serve immediately; reheated cream fritters go leathery outside and watery inside.
Fried custard is one of the oldest sweet fritters in European cooking and survives most visibly as Italian crema fritta, still sold at fairs in Emilia-Romagna and the Veneto, and as the French crème frite of the professional repertoire. The technique depends on a starch-bound custard stiff enough to slice, and cornstarch — a commercial product that became widely available to American kitchens from the 1840s onward — does here what rice flour or bread did in older versions. The vocabulary suggests restaurant rather than home practice: the wooden spoon, the frying basket, the instruction to "dress on a hot dish." Cutting the slab into lozenges — diamonds — rather than squares was a common presentation shape of the period.