[Sca-cooks] fritters!

[Cat Dancer]

Labor Day weekend was a demo/event for one of the WI shires. For the last 
couple of years there's been a small "authenticity encampment" that I've 
been part of. This year, because we had to re-season the Consort's 
cast-iron potje (for reasons I will not go into but will readily admit 
were my fault in the first place) we decided to do something fried in oil 
over the fire.

We did sage fritters and apple fritters from Platina. I managed to forget 
to add the saffron (I blame the lack of sleep) but they were both 
extremely tasty. Platina specifies frying the apple slices briefly and 
then letting them dry before dipping them in the batter, so out of 
curiosity I tried raw apple slices and fried apple slices. The tasters 
voted the fried apple fritters as much better than the raw apple fritters. 
The apple fritters are also delicious cold. The sage fritters are still 
edible and reasonably tasty but *much* better fresh and hot.

I went with vegetable oil instead of lard, because vegetable oil was 
substantially cheaper for the gallon + that was needed.

Apples were Granny Smith, because the owner of the potje has an 
unreasonable prejudice against apples which are not crisp and tart. Others 
more knowledgeable about fruit than I have suggested that 14th c. apples 
would have been less crisp and more sweet.

I used white unbleached flour for the batter, and ended up adding a 
little water to make it more like batter and less like goo. Large eggs, 
because that's what I had.

Due to a complete lack of measuring equipment, what I did was to crack 
three* eggs in a bowl, mix them well, add some sugar and cinnamon and mix 
well. Then I added flour in small amounts until it reached what I 
considered an appropriate batter-like consistency, then I added that 
aforementioned small amount of water so that the batter had a chance of 
actually sticking to the sage and apples rather than just to itself.

*[I'd gotten out four eggs, so one was left sitting lonely on the table. I 
buried it in the hot ashes for ten minutes or so, and then pulled it out, 
let it cool, and peeled it. It was surprisingly like a hard-boiled egg.]


FRICTELLA FROM SAGE (from Milham's translation of Platina)

Dissolve meal with eggs, sugar, cinnamon, and saffron, and work it.  Put
in whole sage leaves, as broad as you want, and when they have been
steeped, fry them in a pan with liquamen or a little oil.  This is
nourishing and helps the nerves, although these are slow to be digested
and cause obstructions.

Frictella from Apples

Morsels of apple that have been cleaned and cored, you fry in liquamen or 
a little oil, and spread them on a board so that they dry. Then roll them 
in a preparation such as we described earlier and fry again.

*This is from the Miscellany--I actually used the Milham edition of 
Platina. Not that this matters all that much. Anyway. I chose to interpret 
"such as we described earlier" as the recipe directly above, which is the 
sage recipe, thus allowing me to use the same batter for both. Next time I 
try the cheese batter option from earlier in the chapter.


Margaret FitzWilliam of Kent