17^th century

Snake Fritters

Many European dishes appear at the same time in contemporary writings, which makes it difficult to determine whether or not they have been inspired by or copied from each other. Recipes for syringed fritters can be found in cookery books in Italy, Spain, France, England, Portugal and Germany by the seventeenth century. Medieval Arabic recipes for piped fritters are also common, which makes you think that maybe the Moors are the originators of the Spanish churros we still know today. The Spanish word for a syringe is a ‘churrera’, which explains the etymology of the name; however, Arabic recipes do not use the choux-like pastry that the churros and other syringed fritters do. So perhaps it is a whole different dish after all.

A recipe for ‘Fruta de siringa’ appears in the Portuguese book Arte de Cozinha (Domingos Rodrigues) in 1758, while a Spanish recipe in Arte de Cocina (Francisco Montiño) in 1763 only instructs to use the dough for syringed fritters in a recipe for ‘Otros buñuelos de viento’ (other fritters).

The first printed recipe in English for these fritters can be found in Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook from 1660. He mentions a ‘butter-squirt’, a syringe used for making decorative butter swirls. He flavours the fritters with saffron and sugar and fries them in clarified butter:

To fry Paste out of a Syringe or Butter-squirt.

Take a quart of fine flower, & a litle leven, dissolve it in warm water, & put to it the flour, with some white wine, salt, saffron, a quarter of butter, and two ounces of sugar; boil the aforesaid things in a skillet as thick as a hasty pudding, and in the boiling stir it continually, being cold beat it in a mortar, fry it in clarified butter, and run it into the butter through a butter-squirt.

Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook, 1660

Elizabeth Jacob’s manuscript recipe of the same period ( Physicall and Chyrurgicall Receipts, 1654–1685) gives a much longer and detailed recipe and the author names the dish a ‘snake’. She instructs that when the dough is pressed through the syringe ‘it must be done quick, and with great Strength’. As flavouring, she uses a little salt, nutmeg and rosewater. While most fritter recipes call for butter to fry, she instructs to use ‘Beasts lard’. To serve she suggests brushing the curls with some butter and rosewater melted together, and then to ‘scrape’ some sugar on them.