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Spanish Fritters
Make a batter of 5 ounces of rice flour, a pinch of salt, rind of a lemon, 1 pint of milk, 1/4 pound sugar, and 1 ounce of crushed macaroons. Add while on the fire 3 eggs, and take it off to cool. Make into balls, dip in bread-crumbs, and fry brown. Dust with sugar and serve with a sauce.
This is a cooked-paste fritter rather than a batter-dipped one: the rice flour and milk are boiled to a stiff panada, enriched with eggs, chilled until sliceable, then crumbed and fried. Everything depends on getting the paste thick and cold.
- The hinge: cook it thick, chill it hardFive ounces of rice flour to a pint of milk, with the sugar, gives a thick paste rather than a batter; cook it until it thickens well and leaves the spoon. Spread it in an oiled shallow tin, cover, and refrigerate for several hours; a warm or slack paste will not hold a ball and may burst in the fat.
- Measures5 oz rice flour is about 1 cup; the pint may be an imperial 20 fl oz or a US 16 fl oz, depending on where the book was published; 1/4 lb sugar is a generous 1/2 cup, which makes these frankly sweet.
- Adding the eggs"While on the fire" reads as beating the eggs in while the pan is still over the heat; take it off the boil first and work on the lowest heat, beating the eggs in one at a time, fast, or they will set into threads. It is safer still to take the pan off entirely, let it cool a couple of minutes, then beat them in.
- The lemon rindPare it in wide strips with no white pith, infuse it in the milk as it heats, and fish it out before the flour goes in. Modern practice would be a couple of teaspoons of finely grated zest left in, which gives more perfume.
- MacaroonsAlmond macaroons — the crisp, meringue-based Italian or ratafia sort, not coconut. One ounce crushed is roughly two small dry macaroons or 1/4 cup of crumbs. Amaretti are the closest thing on a shelf today.
- CrumbingDip in beaten egg before the crumbs or they will not stick to a chilled paste. Fine dry white breadcrumbs, not panko, for the smooth pale-brown finish the recipe expects.
- FryingDeep fat at 350–365F. Any hotter and the crumb colours before the centre is hot; any cooler and the balls drink oil. Fry in small batches so the temperature holds, and drain on paper.
- The sauceNone is named, which was normal in books of this kind. A thin apricot sauce, a wine or sherry sauce, or a plain custard all suit; the fritters are sweet enough that something sharp works best.
- YieldPerhaps 20 to 30 walnut-sized fritters, serving four to six as a pudding. Best eaten within minutes of frying, while the shell is still crisp and the inside creamy.
Fritters built on a stiff milk-and-starch paste, cut cold and fried, are the family the Spanish call leche frita — fried milk — and versions run through Spanish, Italian and French cookery under various names. The crushed macaroons are suggestive of the period: broken almond macaroons appear often as a thickener and flavouring in Victorian and Edwardian sweet cookery, a way of getting almond and sugar into a dish without pounding nuts.