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Drop Johnnies
One cupful sugar and two eggs well beaten together, one cupful cream, three cupfuls buttermilk, one large heaping teaspoonful of saleratus. Salt and spice to suit your taste. Thicken with flour to a stiff batter. Drop in hot fat, a spoonful at a time. Fry the same as fried cakes.
These are drop doughnuts — a loose batter spooned straight into hot fat rather than a dough rolled and cut. The recipe is written for a farm kitchen with cream and buttermilk on hand and a crowd to feed, so the first decision is how much to make.
- Saleratus is baking sodaOne large heaping teaspoon means roughly 1.5 teaspoons of modern baking soda. It works with the acid in the buttermilk; without buttermilk the batter will not rise and will taste soapy.
- The batter is the hinge"A stiff batter" means thick enough to hold its shape on the spoon and release in a lump, not pour in a ribbon. Too slack and the johnnies flatten and soak fat; too stiff and the centres stay raw. Fry one as a test before committing the bowl.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe says only "hot fat." Modern doughnut frying is usually 365-375F. Below about 350F the batter drinks grease; much above 375F and the outside colours before the middle sets. A deep-fry thermometer settles what the original cook had to judge by eye.
- Scale it downFour cups of liquid will take somewhere around 7 to 9 cups of flour and yields five or six dozen. A third of the recipe — 1/3 cup sugar, 1 egg, 1/3 cup cream, 1 cup buttermilk, 1/2 teaspoon soda — is a sensible household batch.
- CreamHand-skimmed nineteenth-century cream varied a good deal in fat, but was generally richer than today's half-and-half. Heavy cream is the safer choice; the fat is what keeps these tender.
- Salt and spiceFor the full quantity, about 1.5 teaspoons salt and 1 to 2 teaspoons of grated nutmeg, with cinnamon or a little mace if you like. Nutmeg was the standard doughnut spice of the period.
- Fry in batchesSix or eight at a time in a deep pan, turning once when the underside browns; two to four minutes total depending on size. Crowding drops the fat temperature and is the usual cause of heavy, greasy results.
- Draining and eatingLift onto a rack over paper rather than flat onto paper, which steams the underside. Roll in sugar while warm if you like. They are best within a few hours and stale quickly.
"Fried cakes" was a common American name for doughnuts in some regions through the nineteenth century, and drop johnnies are their lazy cousin: no rolling pin, no cutter, no resting, just batter and hot fat. The name is a puzzle with no settled answer. It attaches to several plain American griddle and fried breads, most famously johnnycake, and is generally traced to older forms like "jonakin" or "journey cake" rather than to any particular Johnny. The recipe belongs squarely to a dairying household: cream skimmed off the pan and three cupfuls of buttermilk left over from churning were things you used up, not things you bought, and pairing that surplus acid with saleratus was the standard leavening trick before commercial baking powder became cheap and universal.