SC - krapen baked in oil

[Valoise Armstrong]

"Decker, Terry D." wrote:
> 
> > Ok, new cook question time.  How would you bake these dough items in
> > oil? When you fry something in oil, the outside browns but the inside
> > is not supposed to get oily. If it gets oily (thinking of frying donuts)
> > it usually means the temperature of the oil is too low.
> >
> I don't know, which is where experimentation comes into this.  I have the
> feeling the author did not mean precisely what they said.  I'm also working
> from a translation without the original, so I have to accept the
> translator's feel for the language, rather than try to empathize with the
> author.

I've often wondered about the whole "baking in fat" thing. One
possibility is that "bake" is a modern translation of a word that meant
something else, or more than one thing, in the original text's time
period. Another possibility is that the baking in fat involves heating a
pan with fat in an oven, as for popovers or Yorkshire pudding, which
certainly is a pretty effective method of comparatively greaseless
baking in fat. Or, harking back to the first possibility, the krapfen
might simply be fried. Lastly, it might be worth considering that few
cultures have quite the horror of grease on or in their foods to the
extent that modern Americans do, and if a cooking process added some
grease to a dish, that wouldn't necessarily be a reason to assume it
wasn't done. There are both period and modern accounts of people
starving and dreaming of fat. Pregnant women often crave it, and it
seems really to have become a dangerous part of the average person's
diet only when central heating became common, and fewer calories were
needed to simply keep the body warm enough. It's kind of hard to say for
sure, with the information currently at hand, whether these krapfen are
supposed to be greaseless or not.  
 
Adamantius (also a proponent of greaseless krapfen, but trying to be fair)
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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