This was served as part of the banquet course at the Ymir 2023 feast.
Introduction
Thin apple rings fried in a beer-and-milk batter and dusted with sugar. Sarah Longe’s recipe calls for a posset — ale curdled with milk — as the base of the batter, which is essentially the same concept modern cooks know as beer-battering. The posset was a familiar preparation to Sarah’s audience in a way that “beer batter” is to ours; the difference in terminology is larger than the difference in result.
Source
The Recipe Book of Sarah Longe (1610)
Take 3 pints of Milke, a quart of aile, and make a Posset of these, stirre it all together, and lett it stand till it be pretty Cold, then put in 16 Eggs, (taking out halfe the whites) and put in flower, and make it as thicke as you would have it for the ffritters, then put in good store of Apples sliced thin, keepe the butter warme, for if it be cold the fritters will be heavy; fry them on a quick fire, with store of beefe suett.
Discussion
- The apples were sliced into thin rings using a spiralizer, which was an enormous labor-saver at scale and also produced consistent thickness — important for even frying. Before battering, the apple rings were soaked briefly in a very light salt brine (about 1/8 teaspoon per cup of water), primarily to prevent browning during prep, with a mild flavor benefit as well.
- The site we use for Ymir has a VERY large tilt kettle which reaches temperatures suitable for deep frying – about 3ft by 3ft in area. I don’t recommend attempting feast quantities of deepfried foods without similar apparatus – even then, I probably spent 20-30 minutes frying fritters as the feast ended. (I’ve found that if you feed them hot fried foods, diners are willing to wait for them…)
- I used frying oil rather than the “beefe suett” Sarah Longe specifies. The batter was mixed to a pancake-like consistency and the fritters were fried at 375°F until golden brown.
- The fritters were strewn with sugar before serving, as is standard for banqueting-course sweets.
Apple Fritters
Thin apple rings in a beer-and-milk batter, fried crisp and dusted with sugar — an Elizabethan banqueting-course sweet from Sarah Longe’s receipt book (1610).
Ingredients
10 oz ale
2 c milk
3 eggs
1 1/4 lb flour
1 lb tart apples
Frying oil, as needed
Sugar, for dusting
Directions
- Peel and slice apples thinly into rings (spiralizer recommended). Soak in light salt brine (~1/8 tsp salt per cup water), then rinse and refrigerate.
- Mix all liquids (ale, milk, eggs) together.
- Whisk in flour to make a batter of pancake consistency.
- Heat oil to 375°F.
- Add apples to batter, coating well.
- Fry in batches until golden brown on both sides.
- Dust with sugar before serving.
Sources
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Longe, Sarah, and Richard Morland Tollemache Westbury. “Receipt Book of Sarah Longe.” Catalog of the Folger Shakespeare Library, https://catalog.folger.edu/record/230591. Accessed 17 Apr. 2026.
Albala, Ken. The Banquet. University of Illinois Press, 2007. The Food Series.