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Beef Fritters
Chop roast beef very fine, make a batter of milk, flour and one egg, mix the meat with it, put a little butter in the skillet then drop the batter into it from a spoon. Fry until brown, season with salt and pepper. "ZEPHYRS."
Zephyrs is a dainty cold dish of savory kind. Special moulds are necessary. A zephyr mould is an oblong dish of tin about three inches by one and one-quarter inches in size and about an inch deep. To make six zephyrs, spread a little aspic jelly in the center of as many moulds. Garnish this layer with about three tiny shreds of chill pepper, some bits of white of boiled egg and five or six bits of French gherkin. Pour in a very little more jelly to hold this garnish in place. Then lay a small tablespoonful of pate de foie gras in the center of each mould and surround it with more aspic jelly. Let the moulds be set in a pan of cracked ice while you are filling them. When they are well set, and you are ready to serve them, turn them out on a bed of r aspic jelly and surround them with lettuce or sliced tomatoes dressed in French dressing.
Two recipes run together here: a plain fritter made from Sunday's leftover roast, and a chilled aspic canapé that reads as though it wandered in from a caterer's notebook. Neither gives quantities for the parts that matter most, so both need judgment.
- The batter is unmeasuredA workable ratio is 1 cup flour, 1 egg and about 3/4 cup milk, beaten to the consistency of heavy cream, then folded into 1 to 1 1/2 cups of finely chopped cooked beef. Too thin and the fritters spread and fall apart; the batter should just cling to the meat.
- Season the batter, not the finished fritterThe original salts and peppers after frying, which leaves the interior flat. Season the batter, and taste the beef first since roast meat is already salted.
- Fat and heat"A little butter" browns and burns before the fritters cook through. Use a mix of butter and a neutral oil, enough to film the pan generously, over medium heat. The beef is already cooked, so you are only setting the batter and browning it: two to three minutes a side.
- YieldAbout a dozen spoon-sized fritters, enough for four as a light dish.
- Zephyr mouldsAn oblong tin roughly 3 by 1 1/4 inches and an inch deep holds around 2 fluid ounces, about four tablespoons. Small oval ramekins, mini loaf pans, or the cups of a metal ice-cube tray work; anything metal chills and releases faster than glass or silicone.
- "Chill pepper"A typographical slip for chili pepper. Three shreds per mould is a garnish, not heat. "A bed of r aspic" in the last line is another slip for plain aspic.
- The aspic is the hingeIt must be poured barely liquid and only just warm, in thin layers, each set firm on ice before the next goes in. Pour it hot and the garnish floats, the pâté smears, and the layers merge into one cloudy block. Modern powdered gelatin at about 2 teaspoons per cup of well-clarified stock gives a jelly firm enough to unmould.
- UnmouldingDip the mould in warm water for two or three seconds, no longer, and invert onto a chilled plate. Assembled zephyrs keep a day covered in the refrigerator; do not leave them out on a buffet, since the stock and the pâté are both perishable.
The pairing on this page is a fair snapshot of the American household cookbook of a period when a single chapter could set thrift beside display. Beef fritters are pure leftover management, of a piece with hashes and croquettes: the roast is chopped, bound with a batter, and stretched into a second meal. Zephyrs are the opposite impulse, borrowed from the French-inflected restaurant and club cookery that middle-class hostesses were reading about in magazines. The name simply means a light breeze, and it is often said that nineteenth-century cooks applied it to anything meant to seem weightless; the recipe's insistence on "special moulds" reflects a period enthusiasm for shaped, jellied cold food that gelatin in reliable commercial form had recently made practical at home. Pâté de foie gras came in imported tins and was a luxury flourish, which may be why the recipe measures it out one small tablespoonful at a time.