Fritter Day

What the day is

Fritter Day is observed on December 2. A fritter is anything bound in batter and fried, which makes it less a recipe than a technique with an extremely large family.

Origin and background

The word arrives through Old French from the Latin for frying, and the English sense has stayed broad ever since: sweet or savory, batter wrapped around a filling or filling suspended in batter.

Nearly every cuisine with a frying pot reached the same idea independently. India has pakora and bhaji, Spain buñuelos, Italy frittelle. West Africa has akara, made from black-eyed peas, which crossed the Atlantic with enslaved people and became acarajé in Bahia, where it is still sold on the street and remains one of the clearest surviving culinary links between the two regions.

Tempura has the most surprising history of the group. Frying in batter was introduced to Japan by Portuguese missionaries in the sixteenth century, and the name is generally traced to the Latin term for the ember days, the periods when Catholics abstained from meat and ate fried fish and vegetables instead. What began as a foreign import became one of the most refined techniques in Japanese cooking.

The physics is worth understanding, because it decides whether the result is any good. Water in the batter flashes to steam on contact with hot oil and pushes outward, which keeps oil from soaking inward while a crust sets. Oil that is too cool cannot generate that steam fast enough, so the batter absorbs it instead. Greasy fritters are almost always a temperature problem rather than a batter problem.

How to take part

• Use a thermometer. Somewhere around 350 to 375 degrees Fahrenheit is the working range.
• Fry in small batches. Crowding the pan drops the oil temperature, which is the usual mistake.
• Keep the batter cold and mix it barely enough to combine.
• Drain on a rack rather than paper, so steam escapes instead of softening the crust.
• Make one savory and one sweet, since the technique is identical either way.