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Rich Doughnuts
1 cupful sugar 5 tablespoonfuls Crisco 3 eggs 4 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1 1/2 teaspoonfuls salt 1 cupful milk 1 teaspoonful grated nutmeg Flour to make soft dough From 4 1/2 to 5 cupfuls flour sifted before measuring. Cream Crisco, add sugar gradually, and eggs well beaten. Sift dry ingredients and add alternately to egg mixture. Roll out as soft as can be handled. Cut with cutter and fry in hot Crisco. Heat Crisco until crumb of bread becomes golden brown in sixty seconds.
Sufficient for sixty doughnuts.
A standard cake-style doughnut from a manufacturer's cookbook, so shortening appears in every possible role. The recipe assumes you know how to handle a soft dough and how to read frying fat by eye.
- Fat temperatureThe bread-crumb test given here corresponds to roughly 365-375F. Use a thermometer and keep it there: below 350F the doughnuts soak up grease, above 385F they colour before the centre sets.
- CriscoStill sold, though reformulated over the years and no longer made with partially hydrogenated oil. Any solid vegetable shortening works in the dough; for the frying fat, a neutral oil with a high smoke point is equally good.
- Measuring the flour"Sifted before measuring" matters. Sift, then spoon into the cup and level, which gives roughly 4 oz per cup rather than the 5 oz you get by scooping. Measuring the modern way with this flour range will give a dough far too stiff.
- How soft is softThe hinge of the recipe is rolling it "as soft as can be handled." Chill the dough at least an hour before rolling; cold dough handles at a much wetter consistency, and a wetter dough gives a lighter doughnut. Flour the board and the cutter generously rather than working more flour into the dough.
- SaltA teaspoon and a half is about the usual proportion for four and a half to five cupfuls of flour, and reads well against the nutmeg. Scale it with the rest if you halve the recipe.
- YieldSixty doughnuts is a church-supper quantity. Halving the recipe is straightforward, and the dough keeps a day covered in the refrigerator if you would rather fry in two sessions.
- Frying and drainingThree inches of fat, six or eight doughnuts at a time so the temperature does not crash, about 90 seconds a side. Drain on a rack rather than paper so the undersides do not steam soft.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble as promotional literature for Crisco, which the company had introduced in 1911 as an all-vegetable substitute for lard and butter. That accounts for the shortening turning up twice here, once creamed into the dough and once as the frying medium: the book's purpose was to demonstrate that a single tin could do every job in the kitchen, including deep-frying, which was then largely lard's territory. The recipe itself is an ordinary American cake doughnut of the period, leavened with baking powder rather than yeast and scented with nutmeg, a very common doughnut spice in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century receipts.