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Fried Cakes
Take four cupfuls of white sugar, four of buttermilk, one of butter, two eggs, two teaspoonfuls of soda. Season with cinnamon, mix quite hard, roll half an inch thick, cut in rings. They will fry much nicer than when twisted. Griddle-Cakes. To one quart of flour add one teaspoonful of cream of tartar and one three-fourths full of soda, mix with sour or butter milk, and bake on a griddle; season to taste. Buttermilk cakes made the same way, adding two eggs, are ver
Two recipes have run together here: buttermilk doughnuts ("fried cakes") followed by a griddle-cake formula. Both assume a cook who knows what a dough or batter should feel like, because neither states a flour quantity.
- The missing ingredientNo flour is given for the fried cakes. "Mix quite hard" is the whole instruction: add flour until you have a soft but rollable dough that is not sticky, on the order of 10-12 cups for this quantity of liquid. Err on the slack side; over-floured doughnuts fry up tough and dry.
- This is an enormous batchFour cups of buttermilk plus four of sugar and a cup of butter will yield something like six to eight dozen rings. Quartering it is sensible for a home kitchen, and the proportions scale cleanly.
- The sugar is high even for the periodSugar equal to the liquid by volume is sweeter than many nineteenth-century doughnut recipes, which often use considerably less. Heavily sugared dough also browns faster in the fat, so it will colour before the centre is set unless the temperature is watched.
- Soda and buttermilkTwo teaspoons of soda for four cups of buttermilk is the only leavening. It works because the buttermilk is acid, but it acts the moment the two meet: get the dough cut and into the fat promptly rather than letting it stand.
- Frying temperatureThe original names no fat and no temperature; the heat was judged by eye. Use 365-375F. Below that the rings soak fat; above it they darken before cooking through. About a minute and a half per side for half-inch dough.
- Why rings, not twistsThe note that rings "fry much nicer than when twisted" is sound. A ring exposes the interior to the fat and cooks evenly; a twisted or knotted shape traps a raw seam at the centre.
- Cinnamon"Season with cinnamon" is left to the cook. Two to three teaspoons for the full batch is in keeping; nutmeg or mace was the other common choice.
- The griddle-cake formula"One three-fourths full" means a teaspoon three-quarters full, so roughly 3/4 teaspoon of soda to one teaspoon cream of tartar per quart of flour. Add buttermilk to a pourable batter and cook on a griddle at medium heat. The paragraph breaks off mid-sentence in the original; the buttermilk version simply adds two eggs.
"Fried cakes" was the ordinary American name for what most people now call doughnuts, and the two terms sat side by side in cookbooks well into the twentieth century. The dish is generally traced to the Dutch olykoek, an oil-cake fried in fat, carried into New York and New England kitchens; the hole in the middle is a later refinement, and this book insists that rings fry better than twists. What marks the recipe as belonging to its century is the leavening. Buttermilk and soda, and the cream of tartar and soda pairing in the griddle-cakes that follow, offered an alternative to the yeast-raised doughnut and made the whole thing a half-hour job rather than an overnight one. Household soda was still often called saleratus in the earlier nineteenth century, and recipes like these are given without flour weights, trusting the cook to mix "quite hard."