Doughnuts
3 eggs. 1 teaspoon nutmeg. 1⅓ cups sugar. 2 teaspoons salt. 3 tablespoons Cottolene. 1¼ cups sour cream. 5 cups bread flour. 1½ teaspoons soda.
PROCESS: Beat eggs very light without separating the whites and yolks; add sugar gradually, beating constantly; add Cottolene and continue beating. Mix and sift flour, nutmeg, salt, and soda, add alternately to first mixture with sour cream. Chill dough, then toss on a slightly floured board, roll to one-half inch thickness; shape Supplementary Recipes with cutter and fry in deep, hot Cottolene. Drain on soft brown paper. When cool, sprinkle with powdered sugar. 1¼ cup sugar.
A sour-cream doughnut of the plainer cake type, from a cookbook written to sell a particular shortening. The text as printed carries some obvious typesetting damage, so read the quantities with care before you start.
- Stray linesThe sour cream and soda quantities were checked against the printed page and read 1¼ cups and 1½ teaspoons, as given here. The trailing "11/4 cup sugar" is a stray line, and "Supplementary Recipes" is a running page header that landed in the middle of a sentence.
- SaltTwo teaspoons in five cups of flour reads high for a sweet dough by current taste; one teaspoon is closer to modern cake-doughnut practice. This is a judgement call, not a correction of a misprint.
- CottoleneA branded shortening of cottonseed oil stiffened with beef suet, sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company and gone for a century. Use vegetable shortening or lard for the three tablespoons in the dough, and a neutral high-smoke-point oil or shortening for the frying.
- Bread flourTurn-of-the-century "bread flour" was a strong spring-wheat flour. Modern bread flour works, but all-purpose gives a tenderer crumb; either way handle the dough as little as possible, since gluten development is what makes a cake doughnut tough.
- Sour cream and sodaThe soda is neutralised by the acid in the cream, so this only rises properly with genuinely soured dairy. Cultured sour cream or full-fat buttermilk thickened with a little extra flour both work; sweet cream will not.
- The hinge: chill the doughThe instruction to chill is not optional. Cold dough rolls at half an inch without slumping, cuts cleanly, and absorbs far less fat in the kettle. Warm dough spreads, tears and comes out greasy.
- Frying temperatureThe book says only "deep, hot" and gives no test. Modern cake-doughnut practice is usually around 365-375F. Below that the doughnuts soak; above it the outside colours before the centre sets. Fry a test one first and break it open.
- Draining and sugaring"Soft brown paper" is a wire rack set over paper today. Sugar them while barely warm, as the book says to wait until cool, but powdered sugar clings better at blood heat than stone cold.
- YieldFive cups of flour gives roughly two and a half to three dozen doughnuts plus holes, depending on cutter size.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was published by the N. K. Fairbank Company, and Cottolene appears in nearly every recipe because selling Cottolene was the point of the book: it belongs to the great era of the manufacturer's cookbook, when Fairbank, Crisco, Royal Baking Powder and the gelatin companies all issued household volumes whose recipes doubled as advertising copy. Cottolene was cottonseed oil blended with beef suet, marketed hard from the 1890s as a cleaner and more digestible alternative to lard, and the doughnut was a natural showcase since deep frying consumed the product by the quart. The dough itself is older than the branding — sour cream leavened with soda, spiced only with nutmeg, is the standard American cake doughnut of the nineteenth century, and nutmeg has clung to the doughnut so persistently that it remains the defining flavour of the plain cake variety in New England....</json>}Correction: the history text ends at