Carrot Fritters
You’ll find this recipe in:
The Lady’s Assistant for Regulating and Supplying the Table
By: Mrs. Charlotte Mason
London, 1787
Historic Recipe:
Carrot Fritters.
TAKE two or three boiled carrots, beat them with a ſpoon till they are a ſmooth pulp; put to every carrot two or three eggs, a little nutmeg, to three carrots put a handful of flour; wet them with cream, milk or ſack; add to them as much ſugar as will ſweeten them; beat them well half an hour, and fry them in boiling lard; ſqueeze over them a Seville orange, and ſhake some fine ſugar over them.
My Recipe:
2 carrots
5 eggs
½ tsp nutmeg
½ cup white sugar – 60 g
½ cup milk – or cream, or sack (sherry) – 120 mL
¾ cup flour – 110 g
Butter or oil
1 orange (or orange juice)
white sugar (for sprinkling on top of the fritters)
1) Peel and chop the carrots and boil in a pot of water until very soft. Mash them in a bowl once they are cool.
2) Add the eggs, nutmeg and white sugar to the carrots. Next add your liquid (milk, cream or sack/sherry) and the flour. Whisk everything together. Juice the orange if you’re using fresh juice instead of purchased orange juice.
3) Fry the fritters in a frying pan in butter or oil. Once they’re fried on both sides, remove to a plate, spoon some orange juice on top and sprinkle the fritters with sugar.
Carrot Fritters are very delicious, but they taste like oranges, not carrots. I think sneaky parents of picky eaters could blenderize the carrots very smoothly, call them Orange Pancakes and use this recipe to get some vegetables into their kids. \
If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you may have noticed a change in location from the kitchen in my house. I was lucky enough to spend a day preparing food at Nelles Manor Museum in Grimsby, Ontario and these Carrot Fritters were extra delicious because they were fried with a wood fire in the museum’s 230-year old open hearth!
I taught 4 sold-out open hearth cooking classes at Nelles Manor last autumn, and I’ll be teaching 3 more cooking classes on July 28 & 30. As of today, there are still tickets available for all three classes. This time around, we’ll be preparing recipes from the 1780s & 1790s (when Nelles Manor was a newly-built home) during the class and we’ll be taking full advantage of the fresh garden produce that’s seasonally available to us Canadians in late July.
Nelles Manor has also acquired some new cooking implements, so we’ll also be roasting chicken breasts in a reflector oven in front of the fire. Of course, the day that I picked to come to Nelles Manor was 31 C, which felt like 38 C (100 F) with the humidity. So you can imagine that it was not an ideal day to be standing next to a fire.
While the chicken breasts roasted in front of the fire in the reflector oven, I set about testing the different available options for frying the Carrot Fritters over the open hearth: a griddle hanging from a crane over the open fire and frying the fritters over some hot coals shoveled under a trivet, or stand.
Method #1: A griddle hanging from a crane over the open fire
It’s easy to quickly adjust the temperature for any cooking implement hanging off an open hearth crane in two ways: you can swing the crane back and forth, further away or closer to the fire. The second way to adjust temperature is to move the pot or pan up and down using hooks of different lengths.
In this picture, you’ll see a variety of hooks that can be used to make the pan hotter or cooler. I picked up the two hooks that the frying pans are hanging from at Fort George http://www.friendsoffortgeorge.ca/fort-george/ in Niagara-on-the-Lake. I wasn’t sure how I was going to use these handmade hooks when I bought them, but most of the time I hang my frying pans off them in my kitchen and they’ve come in very handy when I teach open hearth cooking!
Method #2: Frying the fritters over some hot coals shoveled under a trivet, or stand.
Another open hearth technique is to shovel hot coals under a trivet or stand and set a frying pan on top of the trivet. I found the best results came from the trivet and hot coals, so that’s what we’ll be doing at the class.
I had to replenish the hot coals once while I was frying my fritters, but frying fritters on a trivet (or stand) & hot coals had a much more even temperature than the other method. To do this, you temporarily move the burning wood aside in your fire and use a shovel to create a pile of hot coals.
Place the trivet and frying pan on top of the pile, and Bob’s your Uncle! Then take a moment to remake your fire by pushing the wood back together and adding one or two new pieces of wood. As you can see, the trivet at Nelles Manor also has a handy support to hold the frying pan handle.
What is the Long S?
When you read the historic recipe, you may have wondered about that unusual alphabetical letter that look like an ‘F’ but appears where an ‘S’ should be? It is the Long S, or Descending S, a letter of the Latin alphabet that fell out of use around the turn of the 19th-century. If you’d like to read more about the Long S, you’ll find a brief history in my To Boil Green Peas blog post. https://www.juliabaird.com/blog/to-boil-green-peas
