Crullers
1 1/4 cup sugar. 4 tablespoons Cottolene. 4 teaspoons baking powder. ½ teaspoon salt. 3/4 cup milk. 1/4 cup Sherry wine.
Cinnamon and powdered sugar. 2 eggs. 4 cups flour. 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg.
PROCESS: Cream the Cottolene, add sugar gradually, beating constantly. Add yolks beaten thick and light, and whites beaten stiff and dry. Mix and sift flour, salt, nutmeg and baking powder, add to first mixture alternately with milk; add Sherry wine. Turn onto a well-floured board and pat and roll to one-eighth inch thickness. • Cut in pieces three inches long by two and one-half inches wide, make four parallel gashes lengthwise of each cruller, at equal distances apart; lift each by running fingers through gashes and drop carefully into hot Cottolene; turn when they rise to top of fat. When cooked, drain on brown paper and sprinkle with powdered sugar mixed with a little cinnamon. (FRIED OYSTERS IN CRACKER MEAL) Wash the desired number of New York Counts, using one cup cold water to a quart of oysters. Drain and dry them between crash towels. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour and dip them, one at a time, in egg, diluted with two tablespoons cold water to each egg. Then dip in fine cracker meal. It is very important that each oyster is well covered with crumbs. Fry in deep hot Cottolene to a golden brown. Drain on brown paper, garnish with stuffed olives and sprays of parsley.
A raised-doughnut dough cut flat, slashed and lifted on the fingers before frying — closer to a Pennsylvania Dutch cruller than to the twisted ring sold today. Two things need sorting before you start: the fat and the missing sugar.
- CottoleneA branded cottonseed-oil shortening, discontinued for decades. Use 4 tablespoons of vegetable shortening or butter in the dough, and a neutral oil with a high smoke point for the frying.
- The sugar is missingThe ingredient list gives no sugar for the dough (only powdered sugar for the cinnamon dusting), yet the process says to cream the fat and add sugar gradually. Something on the order of a cup to 4 cups of flour brings it into line with other crullers of the period, but treat that as a reconstruction, not the original quantity.
- Frying temperatureThe book gives no figure, only 'hot Cottolene'; by modern practice 365-375F suits dough this thin. Cooler and it drinks fat; hotter and the outside colours before the baking powder has finished lifting.
- Roll it thin and mean itOne-eighth inch sounds too thin, but the four lengthwise gashes and the stretch of lifting on the fingers open the dough out considerably in the fat. Thicker dough gives you a doughnut with slits, not a cruller.
- The gashesCut four parallel slits without going through the ends, slide two or three fingers through them to spread the strands, and lower it in. Turn once when it floats; the whole business takes about a minute a side.
- Brown paperGrocery-bag paper was the standard drain. Paper towels or a wire rack over a tray work better and do not transfer ink or sizing.
- YieldFour cups of flour rolled this thin makes a large batch, several dozen crullers depending on how closely you cut. They are best within a few hours.
- New York CountsIn the second recipe, this is a size grade — the largest oysters, sold by the count rather than the volume. Any large shucked oyster substitutes; a quart is about 24 to 30 of them.
- Cracker mealGround crackers rather than bread, and the recipe asks for it fine. Pulse plain saltines in a processor, and let the breaded oysters sit a few minutes so the coating sets.
52 Sunday Dinners was published by the N. K. Fairbank Company, which manufactured Cottolene -- a shortening of cottonseed oil and beef suet marketed hard in the 1890s and 1900s as a cleaner, cheaper alternative to lard. That explains why the fat is named as a brand in every line of this page and why the book exists at all: it is a promotional cookbook. Crullers are generally held to have reached American kitchens with Dutch settlers, the name usually traced to a Dutch word for curling or twisting. The splash of Sherry in the dough is a nineteenth-century habit worth keeping -- most of the alcohol cooks off and leaves a faint winey background that plain crullers lack.