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Honey Doughnuts
3 eggs 1/2 cupful sugar 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 1/2 cupfuls honey 1 cupful sour milk 1 teaspoonful baking soda 1 teaspoonful cream of tartar 1 teaspoonful lemon extract 5 3/4 cupfuls flour 1 teaspoonful salt Cream Crisco, honey and sugar well together, then add eggs well beaten, mix well, add milk, lemon extract, flour, salt, soda, and cream of tartar. Mix and turn out on baking board, roll out and cut with doughnut cutter. Fry in plenty of hot Crisco. If a piece of bread browns in hot Crisco in sixty seconds, temperature is right for doughnuts and fritters.
Sufficient for sixty-five doughnuts.
A Crisco-era cake doughnut, sweetened mostly with honey rather than sugar. The honey is what makes it tricky: it browns faster than sugar and softens the dough, so temperature control matters more here than in a plain doughnut.
- Frying temperatureThe bread-cube test given here corresponds to roughly 365F. With this much honey in the dough, hold the fat at 360-365F and no higher, or the outsides will darken well before the centres set. A clip-on thermometer removes the guesswork.
- CriscoCrisco was new when this was written and the book exists to sell it. Any solid vegetable shortening works in the dough; for the frying, use a neutral oil with a high smoke point. You need at least 3 inches of depth in a heavy pot.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, which no longer exists in a supermarket. Use cultured buttermilk cup for cup, or stir a tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar into a cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes.
- Soda and cream of tartarA teaspoon of each is the period way of making single-acting baking powder on the spot, with the sour milk supplying further acid. It acts once and immediately, so mix the dough and fry it without long delay.
- Flour5 3/4 cupfuls is a starting point, not a rule. Honey doughs are slack, and period flour was less standardised than today's. Add flour until the dough just stops sticking to the board and no further; overfloured cake doughnuts fry up dense and dry.
- Chill before rollingNot in the original, but worth doing. Half an hour in the refrigerator firms the honey and fat enough to cut clean rings that hold their shape when they hit the fat.
- YieldSixty-five doughnuts is a household of the 1910s, or a church supper. The recipe scales down readily, though the three eggs do not divide evenly; a quarter batch with one egg gives about sixteen.
- Draining and keepingLift onto a rack rather than paper so the undersides do not steam. Honey doughnuts stay moist longer than sugar ones but go leathery in a sealed tin; keep them loosely covered and eat within a day.
This comes from one of the recipe books Procter & Gamble commissioned to introduce Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening launched in 1911, to cooks who had always fried in lard or butter. That explains why the fat is named as a brand in every line, and why the bread-cube test appears at all: home cooks were being taught that a manufactured shortening could be trusted at frying heat the way lard was. The doughnut itself is older and plainer than the marketing around it. Cake doughnuts raised with soda and an acid rather than yeast spread through American kitchens in the nineteenth century, and sour milk was the usual acid because every household with a milk pitcher had some. Honey as the main sweetener was a thrift and flavour choice both, and would become a good deal more common a few years later, when wartime sugar conservation campaigns pressed cooks toward honey, molasses and syrup.