Nut Doughnuts
1 1/4 cupfuls sugar 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 1/2 cupfuls milk 2 eggs 4 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1 cupful chopped English walnut meats 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract 1 teaspoonful lemon extract 1/2 teaspoonful salt Flour to make soft dough Cream Crisco and sugar together, add eggs well beaten, milk, salt, extracts, baking powder, nuts, and sufficient flour to make soft dough. Roll out, cut with cutter and fry in hot Crisco to a golden color. Drain and sift with sugar.
Sufficient for seventy-five doughnuts.
A Crisco-company recipe from the 1910s, written for a cook who could judge dough by feel. The flour is left to you, which is the only real difficulty here.
- Flour to make soft doughProbably somewhere in the region of 5 cups of all-purpose flour for this quantity of liquid, though the recipe leaves it entirely to the cook. Add it in stages and stop when the dough just holds together and is still slightly tacky; extra flour is what turns doughnuts into bread.
- Chill before rollingThe original skips this, but a soft doughnut dough handles far better after an hour in the refrigerator. Cold dough rolls to an even 1/3 to 1/2 inch and absorbs less fat in the pan.
- "Hot Crisco" means 365-375FUse a thermometer. Below 350F the doughnuts soak up fat; above 385F the outside colors before the crumb sets. Fry two to three minutes, turning once, and work in small batches so the temperature holds.
- CriscoIntroduced in 1911 and still sold, though reformulated to remove trans fats. Any neutral shortening or a high-smoke-point oil works for frying; the 4 tablespoons in the dough can be shortening or softened butter.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons across roughly five cups of flour is a shade under the modern norm of about a teaspoon per cup, but close enough. Mix it in with a portion of the flour rather than adding it to the wet batter as written, so it distributes evenly.
- Sift with sugarPeriod usage for dusting through a sieve. Confectioners' sugar clings best, and only on doughnuts that have cooled slightly; on hot ones it dissolves into a glaze.
- English walnut meatsSimply shelled walnuts, as distinct from the American black walnut. Chop them fine, closer to a coarse meal than to halves, or they will tear the dough when you roll it.
- YieldSeventy-five is a large count for this quantity of dough, and probably assumes a small cutter and may well count the holes as separate pieces, though the recipe says neither. With a standard 3-inch cutter expect substantially fewer. Halving the recipe is sensible for a household.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for the Procter & Gamble company to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening launched in 1911, and the brand name appears in place of lard or butter in nearly every recipe in the book, twice here. That was the point: cooks had to be persuaded that a manufactured vegetable fat could both cream into a cake batter and stand up to deep frying, and a doughnut recipe demonstrates both jobs at once. The double flavoring of vanilla and lemon extract is characteristic of early twentieth-century American baking, when bottled extracts were cheap and widely advertised, and the enormous yield reflects a period when doughnuts were made in quantity for a household or a church supper rather than by the dozen.