BREAD FRITTERS.—Pick, wash, and dry half a pound of Zante currants, and having spread them out on a flat dish, dredge them well with flour. Grate some bread into a pan, till you have a pint of crumbs. Pour over the grated bread a pint of boiling milk, into which you have stirred, as soon as taken from the fire, a piece of fresh butter, the size of an egg. Cover the pan, and let it stand an hour. Then beat it hard, and add nutmeg, and a quarter of a pound of powdered white sugar, stirred in gradually, and two table-spoonfuls of the best brandy. Beat six eggs till very light, and then stir them, by degrees, into the mixture. Lastly, add the currants, a few at a time; and beat the whole very hard. It should be a thick batter. If you find it too thin, add a little flour. Have ready over the fire a hot frying-pan with boiling lard. Put in the batter in large spoonfuls, (so as not to touch,) and fry the fritters a light brown. Drain them on a perforated skimmer, or an inverted sieve placed in a deep pan, and send them to table hot. Eat them with wine, and powdered sugar.
Instead of currants, you may use sultana raisins, cut in half and well floured.
INDIAN FRITTERS.—Having beaten eight eggs very light, stir them gradually into a quart of rich milk, in turn with twelve large table-spoonfuls of yellow Indian meal, adding a salt-spoon of salt. When all is in, stir the whole very hard. Have ready over a clear fire, in a pot or a large frying-pan, a pound of fresh lard, boiling fast. Drop the batter into it, a ladleful at a time. If you find the batter too thin, stir into it a little more Indian meal. As the lard boils away, replenish it with more. As fast as they are done, take out each fritter with a perforated skimmer; through the holes of which let the lard drip back into the pot. The fritters must all be well drained. Send them to table hot, and eat them with wine and sugar, or with molasses.
In cooking these fritters, you may drop in three or four, one immediately after another; and they will not run, if the lard is boiling fast, and the batter thick enough, and made with the proper number of eggs.
VERY FINE MINCE-MEAT.—Boil two beef’s tongues, (perfectly fresh,) and, when cold, skin and mince them; including the fat about the roots. Mince, also, one pound of beef-suet, and mix it with the chopped tongues. Add four nutmegs powdered; two ounces of powdered cinnamon; and an ounce of powdered mace, with a table-spoonful of powdered cloves. Pick clean, wash, and dry three pounds of Zante currants. Seed and chop three pounds of the best raisins. Mix the fruit with the other ingredients, adding a pound of citron sliced, and the grated yellow rind, and the juice of three large lemons or oranges. Sweeten the mixture with two pounds of sugar, and moisten it with a quart of excellent brandy, and a quart of sherry or Madeira wine. Having thoroughly mixed the whole, pack it down, hard, into small stone jars, covering them closely, and pasting strong white paper over the lids. Do not add the apples till you take out the mince-meat for use, as it keeps better without them. Then take a sufficient number of pippins or bell-flowers, pare, core and chop them, and mix them with the mince-meat, allowing three large apples to a pint of mince-meat. Their freshness will improve the flavour.
It is best to make mince-meat two or three times during the winter; as it will not continue very good longer than five or six weeks. Whenever you take any out of the jars, put some additional brandy to the remainder.
For mince-meat, and all other purposes, use none but the best raisins. What are called cooking raisins, (like cooking butter and cooking wine,) injure instead of improving the articles with which they are mixed. All things of bad quality are unwholesome as well as unpalatable. It is better to do without mince-pies, plum-puddings and plum-cakes, than to spoil them with hard, dried up, indigestible raisins; to say nothing of the trouble of stoning and stemming them, when they are nearly all seeds and stems.