Sarah Harrison’s 1760 Recipe for ‘Apple Froise’

“Cut your Apples in thick Slices, and fry them of a light Brown ; take them up and lay them to drain, and keep them as whole as you can ; then make the following Batter : Take five Eggs, leaving out two Whites, beat them up with Cream and Flour, and a little Sack ; make it the Thickness of a Pancake Batter, pour in a little melted Butter, Nutmeg, and a little Sugar. Melt your Butter, and pour in your Batter, and lay a Slice of Apple here and there, and pour more Batter on them ; fry them of a fine light Brown, then take them up, and strew double refin’d Sugar over them.”

Sarah Harrison, The House-Keeper’s Pocket Book, and Compleat Family Cook (1760)

In all the old recipe books I’ve perused for historical fruit recipes to share here on Orchard Notes, the most common form of an apple-based sweetmeat I’ve come across, time and time again has to be some sort of apple fritter. Which makes perfect sense. Apple fritters are just apple slices fried in sweetened and/or spiced batter, so they’re an incredibly simple dish to prepare and make, and an incredibly simple recipe to describe. This no doubt explains why apple fritters seem to have been ubiquitous from the earliest recipe collections through to the modern day. Take ‘Fryturs‘ for instance, from c. 1500, or ‘Apple Florentines‘ from 1690, or ‘Apple Fritters‘ from 1729, or ‘bignets de pommes a la Bavarre‘ from 1759, or ‘apple beignets‘ from 1913… the list goes on.

Sarah Harrison’s recipe for ‘Apple Froise’ is essentially the same sort of thing, although it does represent a variation on the standard fritter format. Here we have a cream-enriched batter pancake, with a drop of sweet, fortified wine (sack) that sounds as though it’s fried whole-pan-sized, with pre-fried apple slices dropped into it – closer perhaps to William Kitchiner’s ‘Nottingham Pudding‘ of 1823, although that one is baked rather than fried – rather than slices of apple dipped in batter and then fried individually. Although the end of the recipe says to “fry them of a light Brown, then take them up”, which sounds more like multiple, smaller fritters? Perhaps you could do it either way?

The etymology of the title of Sarah Harrison’s recipe intrigues me. According to cambridgedictionary.com, a ‘froise’¹I’d guess at a French origin for the word, but the closest is ‘froisse’, which means ‘crumpled’, so doesn’t necessarily relate to a pancake, or a fritter. (pronounced ‘froiz’, to rhyme with ‘boys’) is simply “a type of pancake often made with bacon”. So far so good, but then Sarah Harrison’s collection of recipes also includes ‘bacon froise’, which sounds more like a ‘Yorkshire’ style dripping-infused batter pudding with added bacon slices thrown in for good measure; a ‘Clary-Froise’, which, involves ten eggs, fresh clary – a perennial herb in the Salvia genus – and a chopped onion, which sounds to me more like an omelette; and a ‘Sweet Clary Froise’ which adds milk and flour to the eggs and then fries the batter, so is much closer to the form of the ‘Apple Froise’. Confused? You could well be. I know I am.

In any case, ‘Apple Froise’ does sound like an incredibly simple recipe to follow – once you’ve decided whether to go whole-pan or individual fritter – and one with potentially quite tasty results. What do you reckon? Do you fancy trying your hand at an Apple Froise? Or is it something you already make on a regular basis? Do let me know if so, via the comments.

Footnotes

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  I’d guess at a French origin for the word, but the closest is ‘froisse’, which means ‘crumpled’, so doesn’t necessarily relate to a pancake, or a fritter. ↩︎