Apple fritters
LUCKY DIP (PART TWO)
The page I opened in my Lucky Dip book had four fairly fancy apple and pear recipes. I am ignoring three of them and concentrating on the apple fritters, because it seemed to me that there might be more to say about these. I also thought that Felicity Cloake might have done one of her wonderful How make the perfect ... posts on apple fritters, but apparently not. Which sort of shows how dated a recipe and how unfashionable it is. Mind you savoury fritters are pretty fashionable, so it can't quite be the health factor that is the issue here.
Well they might be nice, but they are fundamentally unhealthy - deep fat frying and lots of sugar. America now seems to be the heartland for them but the French also do them - they're called 'beignets' there.
There seem to be a basic two types as far as preparing the apples are concerned and a different two types when it comes to the batter. For the apples you either peel, core and slice them or chop them into chunks. For the batter it's either a batter made with flour, eggs and some kind of liquid which can be anything from beer to buttermilk, or a batter that contains yeast, which is obviously rather more tedious. And guess what - the Cordon Bleu version goes for the yeast. Though they do have the grace to say that you can substitute a stiffly beaten egg white for the yeast.
Robert Carrier, being American, has a couple of recipes and in one of these at least he pre-soaks the apples in liqueur or brandy - which is a bit French. And he, and others also flavour the apples with cinnamon.
Delia, Nigella and Jamie as well as Nigel Slater, do not do apple fritters. Interesting isn't it?
As to the origins of this dish - well either the Romans or the Indians. Both of them have recipes for fried battered things - or simply a deep-fried dough - from whence we get doughnuts. So it's been around a long time. The earliest recipe for the dish seems to date back to the 12th or 13th century. And the Asians do fritters too - I remember, that back in the day when I occasionally ate Chinese food, they often had fruit fritters on the menu.
So here are a couple of recipes that I found - just in case you want to binge unhealthily one day. They are nice. I wonder how long it will be before they come back into fashion.
