The third part of Sunday‘s experiments:
68 If you would make filled sheets of eggs, take eggs and beat the whites separately. Take a little fat into a pan, only enough to cover the bottom, and pour the eggs into it. Make very thin sheets and also make sheets from the yolks. Spread the sheets (with) roast apples or with raisins or figs and then roll them over each other (welig si dann uber ein ander) and cut them like rose sausage (rosen wurst). Stick 4 or 5 of them on a skewer of wood. Prepare a batter and roll them in it, then fry them, withdraw the skewers, and cut them open lengthwise.
This was a first attempt and more proof-of-concept than what I would expect the actual dish to have looked like. I wanted to get a handle on the process, and I learned a good deal.
First, the “sheets of eggs”. I was uncertain whether egg yolk fried in a flat pan would actually hold together, but it did. It actually worked better than the egg white which sometimes stuck, tore, and folded over at inopportune moments. I separated seven eggs and beat both the whites and the yolks, but not enough to make the whites foamy. They were fried in a flat crepe pan and carefully transferred to flap plates, and once the sheets had cooled, they were gratifyingly easy to handle.
For the filling, I cooked down apples with a little sugar and spices to produce a thick paste like the apple-honey sauce known as dewericz (Meister Hans #82):
Recipe #82 Ain Condiment haist dewericz
A sauce that is called dewericz Item take a sour apple after St Martin’s Day (11 November), peel them and cut them apart. Then lay them in a honey beverage (hönig tranck). Let it boil so that it turns brown. You may keep this for a year. This sauce is called dewericz. You may also fill krapfen (small pastries) with it.
This is probably not the same thing as the ‘roast apples’ in the recipe, but I thought it would be close enough to be acceptable. Surely, the roasted apples would have been mashed or pureed and quite probably seasoned.
The actual assembly of the fritter went surprisingly easily. I spread the apple sauce on the first white egg sheet, laid a yolk sheet on top, more sauce, another white, and so on until five layer were assembled. Then I rolled them up and secured the roll with toothpicks. The original would now have been sliced and assembled into brows on skewers. Since I had neither long enough skewers nor a pan big enough to accommodate them, I fried the pieces singly instead. After coating them in a leavened batter of egg, milk and flour, I transferred them to a pan at a medium heat, quite ready to see them fall apart. They held together quite well.
After frying, I served them sliced so as to expose the contrasting layers. That part was a disappointment. I think I failed to roll them tightly enough, and quite possibly the sauce was too watery. They were enjoyable – flavourful and rich, with a crunchy exterior – but the visual effect that the original was to achieve eluded me. I want to try this again, with longer skewers and a tighter roll made with a more thoroughly cooked fruit filling.
But still – it was good.