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Mi-Careme Fritters
(Rome.) These are eaten in Lent all over Rome; they are peddled along the street. Boil 3 cups of milk, add sugar to taste, 1 ounce of butter, and the yolks of 4 eggs, and enough corn meal--called semolina in Italy--to make a firm paste, a tablespoonful of brandy, or cordial to flavor. Make into rings, dip in flour, fry in lard, and dust with sugar. Always eaten with gooseberry jam, in Italy for supper.
A semolina porridge cooked stiff, cooled, shaped and fried — closer to Roman frittelle di semolino than to a batter fritter. The hinge is the cooling: the paste must set hard before you try to shape it.
- Semolina, not cornmealThe equation of the two is the author's error. Italian semolino is coarsely milled durum wheat, sold as semolina or semola di grano duro; cornmeal gives a grittier, more polenta-like fritter. Use semolina for the intended result — roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups stirred into the 3 cups of milk.
- Cook it like polentaRain the semolina into the simmering sweetened milk in a steady stream, whisking, and cook it several minutes until it pulls away from the pan. Yolks and brandy go in off the heat so they do not scramble.
- Chill before shapingSpread the paste about 1/2 inch thick on an oiled tray and refrigerate at least two hours. Warm paste cannot be made into rings; cold paste can be cut with a doughnut cutter or rolled into ropes and joined.
- One ounce of butterTwo tablespoons. Sugar "to taste" is about 1/3 cup for a supper sweet — the finished fritters are dusted again, so the paste itself need not be very sweet.
- Frying fat and temperatureLard is authentic and gives a clean, crisp crust; any neutral fat works. Hold 350–365F and fry in small batches, turning once, three to four minutes total. Below 340F the semolina drinks fat and slumps.
- Flour, then fryThe flour coat is what keeps the soft paste from sticking and blistering. Dip just before the fritter goes into the fat; if it sits, the flour dampens and slides off.
- Yield and servingRoughly 18 to 20 rings, enough for six. Dust with sugar while hot so it clings, and serve warm — reheated semolina fritters turn leathery. The recipe insists on gooseberry jam, though any tart preserve does the same work against the richness.
Mi-Carême is French for mid-Lent, traditionally the Thursday of the third week of the fast, when the abstinence was relaxed and sweets were permitted; the French name on a Roman street food reflects how much late-nineteenth-century cookery writing filtered continental food through Parisian vocabulary. Fried sweets of exactly this kind — a stiff semolina custard cut, floured and fried — are still made in Rome and across central and southern Italy, usually as frittelle di semolino, and they belong to the wider Carnival and Lenten habit of frying a cheap treat from a grain porridge. The identification of semolino with cornmeal in the text appears to be the compiler's error.