Home › A Calendar of Dinners › April 18
April 18
Menu: Orange Cocktail; Boiled Capon, Caper Sauce; Buttered Beans *Carrot Fritters; Olive Salad Baked Chocolate Custard; Coffee Carrot Fritters-Have nice, young, tender carrots, clean and scrape them carefully, and cut each one in two lengthwise. Put to boil in salted water. Take up, drain and cool, and make a frying batter as follows: Beat up 1 egg, sift in 1 cup flour, 3/4 cup milk, pinch of salt, and 1 tablespoon melted Crisco. Mix till smooth and glossy. Allow to stand in cool place for 1 hour, then add 1 teaspoon baking powder. Put in few pieces of carrot at a time. Drop into hot Crisco and fry for few minServe hot. utes.
A straightforward fritter batter of the kind that ran through every American cookbook of the 1910s, here written to sell shortening. The one thing to get right is the sequence: the batter rests without leavening, and the baking powder goes in at the last moment.
- Crisco means shorteningCrisco was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, and this book exists to promote it. Any neutral frying oil or solid vegetable shortening works in both the batter and the fryer.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe says only "hot Crisco"; the usual modern range for fritters is about 365-375F. Below that the batter drinks fat and goes greasy; above it the coating colours before the carrot inside is heated through.
- Why the batter restsThe hour in a cool place lets the flour hydrate and the gluten relax, which gives a tender coating. Baking powder is held back so its lift is still available at the moment of frying rather than spent in the bowl.
- Par-boiling the carrotsYoung carrots halved lengthwise need roughly 8-10 minutes in salted water — tender to a knife tip but not collapsing. They must be thoroughly drained and dry, or the batter will slide off in the fat.
- "A few minutes"In practice 2-3 minutes, turning once, until the coating is set and light gold. The carrot is already cooked; you are only crisping the shell.
- Batter consistencyOne egg, one cup flour and three-quarters cup milk gives a fairly thick coating batter. If it sheets off the carrot rather than clinging, adjust by a spoonful at a time.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantity; this much batter will coat roughly a pound of carrots, enough for about four as a side dish. Drain on paper, salt while hot, and serve at once — fritters soften within minutes.
Vegetable fritters were a standing feature of American and British household cookery long before Crisco, a way of turning a plain boiled root into something that could go to table as a course in its own right. What dates this version is the fat: The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to teach cooks what to do with a wholly new product, a solid white shortening made by hydrogenating cottonseed oil, and its calendar of dinners is essentially a year of menus in which fried, creamed and baked dishes call for the brand by name. The company's pitch was that the shortening was odourless and could be used for frying and pastry alike — hence a tablespoon of it in the batter as well as a pan of it on the stove. The fragment of the facing menu here, kidney soup and flounder in white sauce, is a fair sample of the middle-class dinner these fritters were meant to accompany.