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Apple Fritters
1½ teaspoonfuls baking powder 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 egg 1 tablespoonful melted Crisco 3/4 cupful milk 3 apples cut in quarter inch slices 3 tablespoonfuls sugar 1 lemon Peel, core and slice apples, then sprinkle 2 tablespoonfuls sugar and strained juice of the lemon over them. Sift flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt into bowl, add milk to well beaten egg and stir liquid gradually into dry materials, beating thoroughly, then add Crisco. Cover apple slices with batter and drop them into plenty of Crisco heated so that small breadcrumb browns in sixty seconds. Fry for four or five minutes. Drain and sprinkle with powdered sugar. Any other fruit may be substituted for apples or a combination of fruits makes a delicious fritter. Sufficient for twelve fritters. 2 cupfuls flour
A straightforward drop-batter fritter, though the ingredient list has been scrambled in printing — the two cupfuls of flour appear at the very end, after the method.
- The flourRead the list as 2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 3 tablespoons sugar, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1 egg, 3/4 cup milk, 1 tablespoon melted fat. The flour is stranded at the bottom of the original but belongs with the dry goods.
- Splitting the sugarTwo of the three tablespoons go over the sliced apples with the lemon juice; the remaining one goes into the batter. The lemon does double duty, keeping the slices from browning while they wait.
- CriscoIntroduced in 1911 as hydrogenated cottonseed oil, and the reason this book exists. Any neutral frying fat works — vegetable shortening, or a refined oil with a high smoke point. Modern Crisco is reformulated and no longer the same product.
- Fat temperature"A small breadcrumb browns in sixty seconds" is usually taken to indicate somewhere in the region of 350-375F. A thermometer helps: too cool and the batter absorbs fat, too hot and the coating colours before the apple softens.
- Frying timeFour to five minutes suits quarter-inch slices at this temperature. Turn them once so both sides colour evenly, and fry in batches so the fat temperature does not drop.
- Depth"Plenty of Crisco" means a deep, heavy pan with enough fat for the fritters to float rather than sit.
- Batter thicknessThe batter should coat a slice and cling, not run off. If it slides, add flour a spoonful at a time; a thin coat will split in the fat and let the apple steam out.
- Yield and servingTwelve fritters, so three or four servings as a pudding. Drain on a rack rather than paper so the undersides stay crisp, and dust with powdered sugar just before they go to the table.
The Story of Crisco was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco itself came on the market. The book is a promotional cookbook in the frankest sense: every recipe calls for the product, and the frying chapters do the heaviest lifting, because hydrogenated vegetable shortening was being sold as a clean, odourless, keeps-in-the-pantry substitute for lard and butter. Apple fritters were already an old and unremarkable dish by then — battered fruit fried in deep fat runs back through English and continental cookery for centuries — which is precisely why it appears here. A familiar pudding was the easiest way to demonstrate that the new fat behaved as well as the old one, and the closing line inviting the cook to substitute any other fruit is the sort of open-ended encouragement that sells tins.