Pineapple Fritters

Today at work I made a very tasty dish: Pineapple Fritters!  Pineapples would have been consumed by Americans in the eighteenth-century, but they were a very, very expensive fruit.  Only the richest could afford to purchase and eat them.  If you visit Williamsburg you will see images of pineapples everywhere, for the fruit came to symbolize hospitality to Virginians in the eighteenth-century.

I used a recipe from "The French Family Cook" for strawberry fritters, but I prepared it with pineapple since we had one available in the kitchen (and it desperately needed to be used before it went bad).  The recipe reads, "Make a paste with some flour, a spoonfull of brandy, half a glass of white wine, the whites of two eggs beat and green lemon shred fine. Mix it well, neither too thick nor too thin. It should rope in falling from a spoon. Dip some large strawberrys in to it, fry them and glaze them with a salamander."

So, I got out some white wine (you will need quite a bit more than half a glass of wine), brandy, flour, and eggs-- remember to use only the whites.  Since we had no "green lemons," or limes, on hand, I grabbed a lemon, too.  I mixed all the ingredients, except the lemon, together as the recipe says until I got something like the consistency of pancake batter, maybe a little thicker.  If you've made onion rings at home, that's a good consistency to have in mind while mixing this up.  Finally, I cut the lemon in half, squeezed in just a little juice for flavor, and grated in a bit of lemon zest. Then I took my whole pineapple, peeled it, cored it, and cut it into rings.  I placed a frying pan full of lard over the fire, waited for it to heat, then dipped my rings into the batter and put them into the lard.  Once they had cooked to a nice golden brown on each side I took them out.

The next step was challenging for me, but will be easy for you.  Spinkle sugar over each fritter, the finer the better. I suggest castor sugar.  Once you have on the sugar, put it under the broiler until it carmelizes, and then you're done!  This was challenging for me because electric broilers didn't exist in the eighteenth-century.  I had to use a device called a salamander.  A salamander looks like this:

You put the round part in hot coals until it's red hot and shimmering with flame, then use the rod to hold it steady over the items you want broiled.  It's not exactly light-weight either, and I had to return it to the fire multiple times to keep it hot enough to achieve the look I wanted for these fritters.  Some have little legs to set them down, as in the illustration, but mine did not.

Once done, serve immediately.  And enjoy!


(Salamander illustration found here)