The humble fritter: more than just fried dough, says Andrew Coppolino

If you're from Waterloo region, or anywhere within 100 kilometres, you probably know about Waterloo County apple fritters.

This is a region where each fall people queue up in long lines at the Wellesley Apple Butter and Cheese Festival as the luscious snacks are cranked out — literally, by virtue of hand-operated peeling devices — by the thousands. As well, the farmers' markets in St. Jacobs and downtown Kitchener both serve hundreds of the hugely popular treat to the hungry throngs.

The humble fritter — a piece of fruit, vegetable or meat dipped in batter and fried in oil — is a part of the region's food history dating to the first Pennsylvania-Dutch settlers in the early 1800s.

As noted by author and historian Edna Staebler, the word "fetschpatze" (fat sparrow) denotes a little ball of dough fried in lard, and it was part of a recipe repertoire that included drepsly soup, snippled bean salad and apple schnitz pies. While those dishes are now less familiar, the apple fritter is certainly not.

As a food it's ancient, but the word fritter appeared in English (it comes from the Latin frigere, "to fry") in the early 1500s, and it certainly has nothing to do with the phrase "to fritter away your time or money." Warm and sprinkled with sugar or cinnamon — or both — eating an apple fritter is money well spent and anything but a waste of time.

Sweet or savoury

In restaurants and other food operations, you can find these foods in both sweet and savoury variations. At the Kitchener Market, The Apple Fritter can serve as many as 1500 fritters on a busy Saturday. They've taken a variation of the dough used for traditional Romanian cozonac, a yeast-raised cake traditionally served at Easter or Christmas, and transformed it into a dough for the apple fritter. The Fritter Co. at St. Jacobs Market has been a popular snack institution with long lines forming for fritters for three decades.

Cousins to the fritter are the doughnut and the cruller — the former heavier in flour; the latter more fatty. But fritters are not only sweet: the little morsel known as a hush puppy is essentially a cornmeal fritter that you'd find at a southern barbecue joint.

International variations

Northern Italians are particularly fond of fritters. In Ravenna, sweet pine-nut fritters called dolci de pinoli are drenched in rum and served flaming, while in Lombardy, sciatt ("tails" in the local dialect) are tail-shaped fritters of buckwheat infused with grappa, rolled around cheese, fried in lard and dusted with sugar.

As for savoury applications, the pakoras you find in Indian restaurants are hugely popular appetizers; the batter is often made from chickpea flour and binds vegetables, rice, fish or meat.

Another particularly interesting version of a fritter is the vada (or vadai). Fried and savoury, the vada, often eaten for breakfast, is native to south India and is made with legumes or potatoes. It is more difficult to find than pakoras.

The fritter recipe below has a strong savoury element to it. Although 400 years old and modernized, it is remarkable how similar it is to current recipes, a testament to the popularity of the snack and the continuity of culinary taste through centuries.