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French Fritters
Make a batter as for the recipe above, roll it out very thin, and cut into rounds. Put two of these together with a filling of orange or pineapple marmalade, strawberry jam or preserve, free from juice. Pinch the edges and fry brown. Dust with sugar and serve hot.
A jam turnover fried rather than baked, and one of those Victorian recipes that leans entirely on the page before it. Read the two together before you start.
- The missing batterThe instruction "make a batter as for the recipe above" means this recipe has no ingredient list of its own. Since a batter that can be rolled thin and cut into rounds is really a stiff paste, use a rich fritter dough or a plain short pastry of about 2 cups flour, 2 tablespoons butter, an egg and enough milk to bring it together.
- Seal properlyThis is the hinge. Wet the edge of the lower round, press the two together firmly, then crimp — any gap lets hot fat in and jam out, and boiling sugar in a fry pan spits hard. Leave a good half-inch clear border around the filling.
- "Free from juice"The phrase is doing real work. Thin, syrupy jam turns to steam and bursts the seam; use a stiff, spoonable preserve, or drain a looser one through a sieve first.
- Frying temperatureDeep fat at 360-375F. Cooler and the dough drinks oil; hotter and the outside colours before the seam has set. Two to three minutes a side, turning once.
- DrainingLift onto crumpled paper or a rack for a moment before sugaring. Sugar dusted onto greasy pastry dissolves into a slick rather than staying powdery.
- Size and yieldRounds of 2 1/2 to 3 inches are easiest to handle; the dough above gives roughly 12 to 16 filled fritters. Serve at once, as they soften as they cool.
Fried sweet turnovers of this kind belong to a long European family — the French rissole, a fried pastry parcel that could be filled with meat or with fruit, and the beignet in its enclosed form. Sweetened fillings of this sort became easy once commercial jams and marmalades were widely available in the later nineteenth century, which may be why the recipe offers a choice of preserves rather than telling the cook to make one.