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Fried Cakes with Apple Sauce
1 cupful sugar 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 3 cupfuls sour milk 1/4 teaspoonful grated nutmeg 1 teaspoonful lemon extract 1 teaspoonful baking soda 1 teaspoonful baking powder 1/2 teaspoonful salt Flour Apple sauce Cream Crisco, gradually add sugar, then add salt, nutmeg, lemon, soda, baking powder, sour milk and sufficient flour to make stiffish dough. Roll out on floured baking board, cut with large round cutter, and fry in hot Crisco until well cooked and nicely browned on both sides. Drain and serve with hot apple sauce.
Sufficient for twenty cakes.
A plain sour-milk doughnut batter, fried in shortening and served with hot apple sauce as a breakfast dish. Two things need attention: the flour is unmeasured, and the frying fat needs a thermometer.
- Flour quantityThe original leaves it to judgment. With 3 cupfuls of sour milk this will take a great deal of flour; add it in stages and stop as soon as the dough holds a rolled shape without sticking badly. Overshooting gives tough, bready cakes.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured milk, thickened and acidic. Substitute buttermilk cup for cup, or add 1 tablespoon lemon juice or vinegar per cup of whole milk and let it stand 10 minutes. The acid is what reacts with the soda; with sweet milk you get less lift and can taste the unreacted soda.
- CriscoThe book was written to promote it, and it is still on shelves, though reformulated without trans fats. Any neutral solid shortening works for the creaming, and any neutral high-smoke-point oil for the frying.
- Frying temperatureHold the fat at 365-375F. Below that the cakes soak up grease; above it they brown before the centre sets. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- CutterA "large round cutter" with no hole gives thick cakes that are hard to cook through. Roll to about 1/3 inch and either use a doughnut cutter or punch out the centres, unless you want the older solid style.
- DonenessAbout 1 to 1 1/2 minutes a side. Split one from the first batch to check the middle before committing the rest of the dough.
- Both leavenersSoda plus baking powder is deliberate — the soda neutralises the milk's acid, the powder supplies the remaining lift. Do not cut either one, and get the cakes into the fat reasonably promptly once mixed.
- YieldTwenty cakes, which is a generous batch; enough for six to eight at breakfast. The apple sauce should be warm and fairly tart to cut the fried dough.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble as a cookbook-length advertisement for Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company introduced in 1911, and that explains why Crisco appears twice in a doughnut recipe — once creamed into the dough, once as the frying medium. The recipe itself is much older than the product: sour-milk fried cakes leavened with saleratus or soda were standard American farm cookery through the nineteenth century, a way of using milk that had turned before refrigeration made that unnecessary. Serving them with hot apple sauce rather than sugar belongs to the same tradition, in which fried cakes are often said to have served as a breakfast or supper bread as much as a sweet — though they were frequently sweetened, as this one is — and cooked apples were the cheapest thing in the cellar all winter.