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Raised Doughnuts
1 cupful milk 1/4 yeast cake 1/4 cupful lukewarm water 1 1/2 teaspoonfuls salt 1 cupful sugar 1/4 cupful Crisco 2 eggs 1 teaspoonful grated nutmeg Flour Dissolve yeast cake in lukewarm water. Scald milk and cool, then add yeast, half teaspoonful of the salt and flour to make a drop batter. Set in a cosy place to rise. Cream Crisco with sugar, add eggs well beaten, remainder of salt and nutmeg, add to yeast mixture with enough flour to make stiff dough; let rise again. When risen, make into small balls and place in a Criscoed pan to rise. when light drop into plenty of hot Crisco and cook from four to five minutes until doughnuts are done. Drain on soft paper and dredge with powdered sugar.
Sufficient for seventy doughnuts.
A yeast-raised doughnut from the Crisco era, written when a batch of seventy was a reasonable morning's work. The sponge method is sound; the quantities and the frying time need attention.
- Scale it downSeventy doughnuts means balls of dough about an inch across, and it assumes a household or boarding table. A quarter of the recipe still makes 17 or 18 and is far easier to fry in batches.
- Yeast cakeA compressed cake in this period was on the order of half to one ounce (the familiar 0.6 oz cake is the later standard), so a quarter cake is somewhere around 1/2 teaspoon of active dry or instant yeast. That is deliberately little; the dough is meant to rise slowly, twice, and the flavour depends on it. Do not scale the yeast up to speed things along.
- CriscoThe book was published as promotional material for Crisco, hence the brand in every line. Any solid vegetable shortening creams the same way, and butter works in the dough. For the frying, use a neutral oil with a high smoke point.
- Flour, unmeasuredNo quantity is given because the cook was expected to judge it. Expect roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups in the sponge to make a drop batter, and 3 to 3 1/2 cups total for a soft, barely tacky dough. Keep it slack; a stiff dough fries heavy.
- Frying timeFour to five minutes is too long at a correct temperature. Hold the oil at 365-375F and fry about 1 to 1 1/2 minutes per side, turning once, until deep gold. Longer than that and the sugar-rich dough darkens and dries. The original timing suggests a cooler kettle than modern practice.
- Second rise on the panThe shaped balls proof on a greased pan, not on a floured board, and go into the fat directly from there. Handle them gently and keep them lightly covered so no skin forms, or they will not puff.
- "A cosy place"Around 75-80F. The top of a switched-off oven with the light on is close enough.
- FinishingDredge with powdered sugar while the doughnuts are still warm but no longer greasy-hot, so it clings without dissolving into paste. Drain on a rack over paper rather than sitting them in it.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of a series of cookbooks issued by Procter & Gamble after Crisco came on the market in 1911, which is why hydrogenated shortening appears in the dough, in the pan and in the frying kettle of a single recipe. The doughnut itself is older and plainer than the book: raised, or yeast, doughnuts are generally traced to the Dutch oliekoek and were long the standard American form, with the quicker chemically leavened cake doughnut spreading after the arrival of baking powder and displacing them only later. Nutmeg is the traditional spice in both kinds, and its persistence in American doughnut recipes is one of the more reliable survivals in the whole genre. A yield of seventy tells you something too, about kitchens that fried in a deep iron kettle for a household, a church supper or a boarding house rather than for four people at breakfast.