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Vienna Fritters
Boil 2 ounces butter, 2 teaspoonfuls of sugar, grated rind of a lemon, and a cup of water, 10 minutes. Add 5 ounces of flour and stir until it is smooth, then take it off the fire, and add, one by one, beating between each, 5 eggs, beat them until light and drop in spoonfuls in boiling fat. Dust with powdered sugar and serve with wine sauce.
This is choux paste — the same batter as cream puffs — dropped into hot fat rather than baked, so it puffs into hollow, custardy fritters. Two things decide whether it works: how much water is left after the boil, and how much egg the paste will actually take.
- The ten-minute boilBoiling butter, sugar and water for a full ten minutes will drive off a good part of the cup, leaving a much richer, stiffer base than modern choux instructions produce. Cover the pan or top the water back up to a cup before the flour goes in, or the paste will be too dry to absorb the eggs.
- Weights in modern terms2 ounces butter is 4 tablespoons; 5 ounces flour is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons, measured by weight if possible. A cup here is 8 fluid ounces.
- Add the eggs by feel, not by countFive eggs is generous for 5 ounces of flour, and eggs of the period were likely smaller than today's large eggs. Beat them in one at a time and stop when the paste falls from the spoon in a thick, glossy ribbon; a slack batter will spread and drink fat instead of puffing.
- Dry the paste firstAfter the flour goes in, keep stirring over the heat a minute or two until the mass pulls away from the pan and leaves a thin film on the bottom. That step, only implied by "stir until it is smooth," is what gives the fritters their lift.
- Fat temperature"Boiling fat" is usually taken to mean somewhere around 350°F; some cooks start fried choux a little cooler still. Too hot and the outsides set before the centres expand, leaving raw paste inside; too cool and they soak. Fry in small batches — they swell to several times their size and want room to turn themselves.
- Cook them throughAllow 6–8 minutes, longer than looks necessary. They should be deep gold and feel light and hollow; a pale fritter is a wet one. Split one from the first batch to check before committing the rest.
- Lemon rindGrated zest only, no white pith, and use an unwaxed lemon. Boiled in the water for ten minutes it will perfume the whole paste.
- Wine saucePeriod wine sauces of this kind were typically sweetened wine — sherry or Madeira among others — with sugar and butter, sometimes thickened with egg yolk or a little cornflour, served warm. Any wine custard or sabayon serves the same purpose.
- YieldPerhaps 20 to 24 fritters, depending on the size of the spoonfuls. They collapse as they cool, so fry and serve in quick succession.
Fritters of this kind are known in French as beignets soufflés — choux paste fried rather than baked, so that the steam trapped inside blows the puff hollow. The technique is the same one behind cream puffs and éclairs, and it appears in nineteenth-century cookbooks as a party dish precisely because it is theatrical: a spoonful of stiff paste becomes a ball several times its size in the space of a few minutes. The name "Vienna" is in keeping with a turn-of-the-century taste for dishes labelled by their city of origin. The wine sauce alongside suggests a formal dessert course rather than a homely fry-up.