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April 3
Menu: Crecy Soup; Mutton Cutlets Savory Lentils; Roast Pigeons Chipped Potatoes; Egg and Lettuce Mayonnaise; Apricot Fritters, Vanilla Sauce; Coffee Apricot Fritters-6 apricots, 1/2 pint syrup, half lemon, frying-batter, Crisco, and vanilla sauce. Select firm, ripe apricots, or preserved ones can be used, cut them in halves, and take out stones. Stew them gently in syrup with grated rind of 12 lemon. When they are tender, drain well, and let them cool. Have ready some frying-batter, dip apricots into it, then fry in plenty of hot Crisco. When a nice golden color, take them up, drain on paper, dish up on a napkin and serve with vanilla sauce.
A straightforward poach-then-fry dessert of the sort that filled turn-of-the-century dinner calendars. The whole thing hinges on getting the fruit dry before it meets the batter.
- Dry the fruitPoached apricot halves hold a great deal of syrup, and any moisture left on the surface will make the batter slide off and the fat spit. Drain cut side down on a rack, then blot with paper and let them cool completely before dipping.
- Half pint of syrupOne cup. No proportions are given; a light poaching syrup, sugar and water, is the likely intention, and it needs only to cover the fruit in a small pan. If you use preserved apricots, as the recipe allows, the stewing can be skipped and the fruit simply drained.
- The lemonThe ingredient line calls for half a lemon and the method wants its grated rind. Zest half a lemon into the syrup; the juice can go in too, and helps keep the syrup from candying.
- Poaching timeFresh firm-ripe apricots need only 4 to 6 minutes at a bare simmer. Stewed until soft they collapse in the fryer, and the recipe's "gently" is doing real work.
- Crisco and frying temperatureCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold and still perfectly usable; any neutral frying oil behaves the same. "Plenty of hot" means 2 to 3 inches at 365-375F, hot enough to set the batter at once. Below about 350F the fritters absorb fat and go heavy.
- Frying batterThe recipe assumes the reader has a batter to hand; the book's own frying-batter recipe would be elsewhere in the volume. A plain coating batter -- flour, a pinch of salt, an egg and enough milk or water to reach the thickness of heavy cream -- will serve. Fry three or four halves at a time so the fat does not drop in temperature; two to three minutes gives the golden color asked for.
- Vanilla sauceA thin vanilla custard (crème anglaise) or a cornstarch-thickened vanilla sauce, served warm. Either can be made while the apricots cool.
- Dishing on a napkinPeriod service placed fried items on a folded linen napkin on the plate to absorb the last of the fat. A paper-lined dish does the same job if you would rather not launder linen.
- YieldSix apricots give twelve fritters, enough for three or four people as a dessert course.
This comes from a Crisco promotional cookbook, published after Procter & Gamble introduced the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening in 1911, and the frying recipes are the heart of the sales pitch: a solid white fat advertised as cheaper than butter, as keeping without refrigeration, and as having no flavor of its own or of lard. Fruit fritters were already a fixture of English and American dessert courses, and the technique of stewing fruit in syrup before battering it is standard in nineteenth-century household manuals. What is new here is only the fat named in the ingredient list. The "Calendar of Dinners" format, assigning a full menu to each date of the year, addressed a housekeeper expected to plan without repeating herself.