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Fritot of Turkey, Italienne
Remove all meat from turkey left over from day before yesterday, then cut it into pieces one inch long by one-third of an inch thick and place it on a dish. Season with one teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, a teaspoon chopped parsley, two tablespoons lemon juice and a tablespoon olive oil; thoroughly mix pieces in seasoning, then let infuse for thirty-five minutes, tossing pieces once in a while.
Prepare a frying batter, take up pieces from seasoning and drop in batter, lift up, drop them one by one in boiling fat and fry for ten minutes, turning with skimmer once in a while. Lift up, drain on cloth, arrange on a hot dish with a folded napkin, one on top of another, decorate with a little parsley greens and serve with a gill hot tomato sauce separately.
A leftover-turkey fritter, and the one thing to change is the frying time: the meat is already cooked, so ten minutes only dries it out and darkens the batter.
- Fry for two to three minutes, not tenThe turkey needs nothing but heating through; the batter sets and colours in about two minutes at 360-375F. Ten minutes at that temperature gives you a dark crust over stringy meat.
- Fat temperature"Boiling fat" means roughly 360-375F. Below that the batter absorbs oil; above 385F it browns before the inside is hot. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- The frying batterThe book assumes you know one. A plain version is 1 cup flour, 1 egg, about 3/4 cup milk or beer and a pinch of salt, beaten smooth and rested 20 minutes; it should coat a piece of turkey without sliding off.
- A gillHalf a cup, which is the right amount of tomato sauce for this quantity as a dipping sauce served separately.
- Drain the marinade wellThe lemon juice and oil must be blotted off the pieces before they go into the batter, or the coating will not adhere and the wet meat will spit in the fat. Pat dry on paper towel.
- "Day before yesterday"Written for an icebox era. Cooked turkey keeps three to four days refrigerated; if it has gone slippery or sour, do not batter it and fry it, since frying hides nothing.
- FritotAn older French term for small fried morsels in batter. The pieces are cut small, one inch by a third of an inch, which would have them cook through quickly.
- The napkinPeriod presentation: a folded linen napkin on the platter absorbed drips. A rack or paper-lined dish does the same job and keeps the crust crisper.
- YieldThe recipe gives no weight; the seasonings suit roughly a pound of picked turkey meat, which would serve about four as a first course or two as a light main.
Fritot is an old French kitchen word for morsels of meat or poultry marinated, dipped in batter and deep-fried, and by the late nineteenth century it appears in professional repertoires as one way of turning the previous day's roast into a fresh-looking dish. The "Italienne" tag here most likely refers to the accompanying tomato sauce rather than to any Italian origin; in the classical repertoire a sauce italienne was built on a duxelles of mushrooms with tomato, ham and herbs, and cookbooks of this period commonly attached national adjectives to garnishes and sauces as a shorthand. The marinade of lemon, oil and parsley serves to freshen meat that had lost its roasting juices.