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Jersey Wonders
3 ozs. (6 tablespoonfuls) butter 6 ozs. (11/½ cups) flour 6 ozs. (1½ cups) cornstarch 2 ozs. (4 tablespoonfuls) sugar 1/2 teaspoonful grated nutmeg 1 teaspoonful baking powder 2 eggs Milk or water Raspberry jam Hot fat Rub the butter into the flour, corn-starch and baking powder, add the sugar, nutmeg, eggs well beaten and sufficient milk or water to make a stiff batter. Fry in smoking hot fat, a teaspoonful at a time. When nearly cold, make a hole in the top, fill with raspberry jam, and dust over with fine sugar. 1
A fried batter fritter, filled with jam after cooling — closer to a doughnut hole than to the twisted dough that Jersey islanders usually mean by the name. The one thing to get right is the fat temperature.
- "Smoking hot fat"Take this as an instruction to have the fat properly hot, not literally smoking — fat at its smoke point will scorch the outside before the centre sets. Aim for 350-365F and hold it there; drop in only as many spoonfuls as will keep the temperature from crashing.
- The weights, not the cupsThe bracketed cup measures follow the older convention of roughly four ounces of flour to the cup, so they are not far off; by modern scoop-and-level, six ounces of flour is about 1 1/3 cups and six ounces of cornstarch about 1 1/3 to 1 1/2. Weigh both if you can. Butter at 3 oz is 6 tablespoons as stated.
- Half cornstarch is intentionalEqual weights of flour and cornstarch give a very short, crumbly, almost shortbread-like interior rather than a chewy one. Do not substitute all flour, and do not beat the batter hard once the liquid goes in.
- "Stiff batter" means dropping consistencyYou want something that holds its shape on a teaspoon and does not run — thick enough to push off with a second spoon. Add the milk a tablespoon at a time; the amount will vary with your eggs.
- SaltThe original includes none. A generous pinch in the dry ingredients sharpens both the nutmeg and the jam.
- Grated nutmegHalf a teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg is assertive; pre-ground nutmeg that has sat in a jar is not. Grate it yourself and the quantity is right.
- Filling themWait until they are nearly cold, as written — warm fritters tear, and warm jam runs straight out. A skewer or the handle of a small spoon makes the hole; a piping bag with a narrow nozzle fills it cleanly.
- YieldTeaspoon-sized portions from this quantity give a large number of small fritters; the exact count depends on how heaped the spoon is. They are best the day they are made and go soft by the next.
Jersey wonders — des mèrvelles in Jèrriais, the island's Norman French — are the best-known sweet of the Channel Islands, and traditionally they are a firm dough rolled, cut into rectangles, slit and pulled through itself to make a twist, then fried. Island lore, of the sort passed down rather than documented, holds that they should only be fried on a falling tide, or the fat will boil over. What appears here is a looser cousin: a batter dropped by the spoonful and filled with jam afterwards, the sort of adaptation that happened when a regional speciality travelled into general English and American recipe collections and met the vogue for cornstarch, which was promoted from around the middle of the nineteenth century as a way of lightening cakes and fried goods. The result belongs less to Jersey than to the general run of small fried sweets meant to be produced quickly from storecupboard staples.