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Orange Fritters
Peel, skin and divide three sound, juicy oranges in sections, place in a bowl with an ounce sugar and two tablespoons rum, turn well in seasoning, and let infuse for fifteen minutes.
Prepare a frying batter roll the oranges in the batter, then drop in boiling fat and fry for ten minutes. Remove, drain on a cloth, dress on a dish with a folded napkin, sprinkle a little powdered sugar over and serve.
A straightforward fruit fritter, but two details in the original will mislead a modern cook: the frying time and the missing batter recipe.
- Ten minutes is far too longOrange segments in batter need 2-3 minutes at 350-360F, turning once, until the coating is golden. Ten minutes gives a dark, greasy shell and reduces the fruit inside to hot juice that bursts the crust.
- The batter is left to you"A frying batter" is not specified anywhere in the recipe. A plain coating batter of the period runs to roughly 1 cup flour, 1 egg, a pinch of salt and enough milk or beer to make a coating thick enough to cling to the back of a spoon. It should be slack enough to drip slowly, not pour.
- Fat temperature"Boiling fat" is not literal boiling; it means fat hot enough to shimmer and brown a bread cube in under a minute, roughly 350-360F. Below that the batter absorbs oil, above 375F it colours before the fruit heats through.
- An ounce of sugarAbout two tablespoons. Sprinkled over the segments with the rum, it draws out juice, which is the point of the fifteen-minute infusion.
- Dry the fruitThe recipe does not say it, but the macerated segments must be blotted before battering. Wet fruit sheds its coating in the fat and spits.
- Peel, skin and divide"Skin" here means removing the white pith and the membrane around each section, so the segments are supremed. Loose membrane traps steam and splits the batter.
- The folded napkinA period plating convention: fritters were dressed on a linen napkin on the serving dish to absorb residual fat. A paper-lined warm plate does the same work.
- YieldThree oranges give roughly 30 segments, enough for four as a dessert. Fry in small batches and serve at once; they soften within minutes.
Fruit fritters — batter-dipped and deep-fried — run through European cookery from the medieval period onward, and citrus versions appear once oranges were cheap enough to treat as an everyday dessert rather than a luxury. The rum maceration, the finishing sprinkle of powdered sugar and the folded napkin are conventions of professional kitchens of the period, the same treatment given to pineapple, apple and banana fritters.