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Rye Fritters
2½ cups rye flour 3/4 cup Karo, Blue Label 1/4 cup Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 1 cup cornmeal 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon baking soda 1 egg 1¼ cups milk Combine the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl. Dissolve the soda in a tablespoon of water and add with the liquid ingredients and the egg, beaten. Half fill the frying kettle with Mazola and heat to 350 degrees F. or until it will brown a bit of bread in one minute. Drop in the fritter batter by large teaspoonfuls and fry from eight to ten minutes. Drain on crumpled paper and serve with heated Karo, Blue or Orange Label.
Karo Rye Fritters-The materials and utensils for making
A brand-book fritter from the Corn Products Refining Company, so nearly every ingredient is a trademark. Translating the labels is most of the work.
- The brand namesMazola is corn oil, still sold under that name. Argo and Kingsford's were the company's cornstarch brands; any plain cornstarch works. Karo was sold under several coloured labels of differing colour and flavour; Blue Label appears to have been one of the darker grades, so dark corn syrup is a reasonable stand-in, and any corn syrup will serve for the heated syrup at table.
- Frying timeEight to ten minutes at 350F is far too long for teaspoon-sized drops; they will be leathery and dark. Fritters this size are done in three to four minutes, turning once, when they float high and sound hollow. Break one open to confirm the center is set before committing the batch.
- Rye flourUse light or medium rye. Whole dark rye or pumpernickel flour absorbs more liquid and will give a stiff, heavy batter that fries into a dense lump rather than a fritter.
- The sodaThere is little acid here to react with a full teaspoon of baking soda, so it risks a soapy, faintly metallic taste. Half a teaspoon is safer, or keep the teaspoon and expect a pronounced alkaline note. Dissolving it in water first, as written, does help it disperse evenly through a batter this heavy.
- Batter consistencyWith 2 1/2 cups rye flour, 1 cup cornmeal and only 1 1/4 cups milk plus egg and syrup, this is a thick drop batter, not a pourable one. That is intentional: it holds its shape in the fat. If it will not release from the spoon at all, thin with milk a tablespoon at a time.
- Frying vessel and depth"Half fill the frying kettle" means a deep, heavy pot filled no more than halfway with oil, which is still the right rule. Three inches of oil in a Dutch oven is ample. Fry in batches of six or so; crowding drops the temperature and the fritters absorb fat.
- Draining"Crumpled paper" was brown paper or newsprint. Paper towels work, but a wire rack over a sheet pan keeps the undersides from steaming soft.
- YieldThe recipe gives none, but a batch of this size will run well past two dozen fritters. They are best within minutes of frying and do not reheat well.
This comes from the genre of manufacturer-issued cookbooklets that flooded American kitchens in the first decades of the twentieth century: the Corn Products Refining Company promoted Karo syrup, Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch and Mazola oil together, and its recipe pamphlets were written so that a single dish used as many of the house brands as possible. Hence a fritter sweetened with corn syrup, thickened partly with cornstarch, fried in corn oil and served with more corn syrup. The rye and cornmeal base points to an older tradition — rye-and-Indian batters were a New England staple long before Karo existed — but here it has been recast as a luncheon dish for the syrup pitcher, which is how a good deal of nineteenth-century plain cooking survived into the branded era.</p>