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Peach Fritters
Prepare a frying batter, peel, cut in halves and remove the stones from six medium, ripe peaches, then cut each half in two. Place them in a bowl, add one tablespoon sugar and two tablespoons maraschino, turn well in the seasoning and let infuse for fifteen minutes. Roll in the batter, and drop them one by one in hot fat--but not boiling--and fry for ten minutes, turning with the skimmer once in a while. Lift up, drain on a cloth, trim a little, pour a hot Sabayon sauce on a dish, dress the peaches and sprinkle powdered sugar over, then serve.
A late-Victorian dessert fritter that assumes you already know two other recipes: a frying batter and a sabayon. The only instruction worth overriding is the frying time.
- Ten minutes is far too longA battered peach quarter in fat at 350-360F is done in 3-4 minutes, golden and crisp, and the fruit inside is hot through. Ten minutes will darken the coating to bitterness and collapse the peach to jam. Fry in small batches so the fat does not drop below temperature.
- "Hot fat--but not boiling"Fat does not boil at frying temperature; the writer means fat that is not smoking or violently shimmering. Use a thermometer and hold 350-360F, which is the standard range for a sweet batter that needs colour without scorching.
- The batter is not givenThe book expects a separate frying batter from elsewhere in the volume. Any standard one works: roughly 1 cup flour, 1 tablespoon sugar, a pinch of salt, an egg, and about 3/4 cup milk or beer whisked to the thickness of heavy cream. Let it rest 30 minutes so it clings rather than slides.
- MaraschinoThis means maraschino liqueur, the clear Dalmatian cherry-stone spirit, not the syrup from a jar of dyed cocktail cherries. Luxardo and similar bottlings are the same product. Kirsch or a good white rum stands in acceptably; the jar syrup does not.
- Sabayon sauceZabaglione by its French name: egg yolks, sugar and a fortified wine such as Marsala whisked over barely simmering water until thick and foamy. It must be made at the last minute and served warm, as it separates on standing. Plan to whisk it while the fritters drain.
- Peeling the peachesFreestone peaches at full ripeness peel most easily after 30-45 seconds in boiling water and a plunge into ice water. Very ripe fruit will also shed water into the batter, so pat the quarters dry after the maraschino soak.
- "Trim a little"Snip off the ragged tails of batter with scissors or a knife so each piece looks neat on the dish. Purely cosmetic.
- YieldSix peaches give 24 pieces, enough for four to six as a dessert. Dust with confectioners' sugar and serve immediately; fritters go soft within a few minutes.
Fruit fritters run through European cookery for centuries, but this particular treatment -- fruit macerated in liqueur, battered, fried and served over sabayon -- is restaurant food of the Escoffier era, the kind of dish a hotel kitchen turned out by the dozen. The International Cook Book (1906) was assembled by Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, and the reliance on a named liqueur, a separately prepared frying batter and a whisked wine custard all point to a professional brigade rather than a home cook working alone. Sabayon is the French rendering of the Italian zabaglione, generally traced to Piedmont and Emilia, and its arrival in French and American hotel kitchens in the nineteenth century gave chefs a warm sauce that could be built in minutes from three ingredients already on hand. The maraschino here is worth noticing: before Prohibition-era manufacturers attached the name to bright red preserved cherries, it meant the Luxardo-style liqueur distilled from marasca cherries, and a cookbook of this vintage assumes the reader knows the difference.