Frittering Away My Time
Apple fritters. I know what they are: sweet and crumbly and deep fried. I like ‘em. But I have rarely encountered or eaten anything else that has been frittered, and it turns out that we once fritterized a lot of foods: pineapple, clams, and corn among them. Dip in a drippy soft dough, deep fry, and coat with a glaze.
A look at some early Oregon cookbooks and menus reveals the variety and the variants. The Portland Hotel, in its opening year of 1890, featured pineapple fritters with maraschino sauce on its menu as an entrée, right along with lamb chops and fillet of beef a la Monglas. Clam fritters show up at Portland’s Elk Restaurant about 1902, and the Meier & Frank department store café was serving them up in 1959. Corn fritters show up on menus for the Hazelwood in Portland (1919), the Congress Hotel in Portland (1935), and on Union Pacific Railroad dining cars in the 1950s. The dining room of the coastal steamship SS Great Northern between Flavel (with train connection from Portland) and San Francisco boasted of banana fritters with glace cognac in 1915. Back in 1907 the Hotel Moore in Seaside proffered farina fritters with brandy sauce, while the Union Pacific’s streamlined train City of Portland served grape fritters with their crispy fried chicken dinner in 1951.
Aboard the City of Portland, September 1951
The clam fritters recipe from the Warrenton Clam Company, shown below, dates to about 1925. The firm canned razor clams dug from the sandy shores of Clatsop County and “packed in their own nectar by white labor.” Other Oregon menu appearances for clam fritters include the Chinese-owned State Café in Huntington (ca. 1918), the Congress Hotel, Portland (1935), Sherwood Lodge in Yachats (1951), and the Tyee Grill in Wheeler (ca. 1955).
Fritters today are mainly sweet treats rather than savory sides, but wrapping some good stuff up in dough and frying it is still a common food preparation method. Go get some canned clams and give ‘em a try! But good luck finding any canned Oregon razor clams, though you might find some at Bell Buoy in Seaside.
