In honour of my mum who was my first food inspiration , I give you Lamb Fritters. A lamb roast was not all that common as  I was growing up, more often than not it was actually mutton or hogget. ( I still love the smell and taste of a long, slow-cooked mutton roast.) I always hoped there would be enough meat left over to have lamb fritters the next day, what a treat! A couple of weeks ago as I popped a piece of roast lamb into my mouth I could just smell the fritters that Mum used to make, I could hear that first hot crunch of the batter which burnt your tongue because you couldn’t wait to shove them into your mouth , I could  the taste the  salt and the tomato sauce bringing out the flavour of the lamb….oh my, eating is such  a full sensory experience!!! In the early 1950s when Mum and Dad were first married they  lived in the small farming town of Borden where Dad was the teacher at Salt River School .

There were no phones of course, so when Mum decided to make lamb fritters and couldn’t remember the batter recipe, where did she turn?  Like most women of the time she turned to the Golden Wattle cookbook. Her copy has long since fallen apart, so this my copy. As you can see, it has been well used!

For the batter we used the pancake batter with half the amount of milk and SR flour instead of plain . And of course the fritters were always cooked in some of the dripping from the previous night’s roast.

LAMB FRITTERS

Ingredients

• slices of left over lamb roast, about 1.5 cm thick
• 1 cup of self raising flour
• pinch of salt
• 1 egg
• 3/4 cup of milk
• tomato sauce for serving, and by tomato sauce I mean real tomato sauce in a bottle, like Heinz or Rosella, not that stuff where  you cook up tomatoes and push them through a sieve!

Method

• Sift salt and flour. Make a well in the centre and drop in egg. Stir in gently, adding about half the milk gradually and drawing the flour in slowly.
• Beat with wooden spoon for 10 minutes until the batter is creamy and bubbly  (as a child my dad was the household beater, he could cream butter and sugar to perfection!)

• Add reminder of milk and stand in a cool place for at least 1/2 an hour
• (That of course is the traditional method. Usually what I do is mix all ingredients together, beat vigorously for a few minutes and let stand for an hour if you have enough time, if not use straight away.)
• Heat enough dripping to thinly  cover the bottom of the fry pan
• Dip slices of lamb into the batter and fry until golden brown and crunchy.  Serve sprinkled with parsley. My mum always used to say you had to chop the parsley so finely that you couldn’t see the shape of the leaf!

• 

  I don’t think this would have passed the ‘no leaf’ test!

I’d love to hear from you, what meal reminds of your mother?