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New England Crullers
1 cup Sugar, 1/2 cup thick sour 2½ cups sour Milk or Buttermilk, rounded teaspoonful The Great Cream, or soft 1 Butter or Lard, 5 to 6 cups Flour, 2 Eggs, "Arm & Hammer" Soda. 1 teaspoonful Mace or Nutmeg.
Beat together the sugar, eggs and thick sour cream or soft butter or lard. Pour in the sour milk or buttermilk and The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda. Then mix very lightly with the sifted flour. For flavor use mace or nutmeg. This dough should not be very stiff and not worked much, otherwise the crullers will be tough. Roll out a half inch thick cut in shape desired and let raise a few minutes, until the lard gets well heated. When raised and brown on bottom, turn with a fork. The fat must sizzle when you put a few drops of water in it.
Otherwise it is not hot enough. These crullers will keep fresh for a week in a stone crock.
The ingredient list has been scrambled by the original two-column layout; read it as 1 cup sugar, 1/2 cup thick sour cream (or soft butter or lard), 2 1/2 cups sour milk or buttermilk, 1 rounded teaspoon soda, 5 to 6 cups flour, 2 eggs, and 1 teaspoon mace or nutmeg. The rest is a straightforward buttermilk cake doughnut, and the warnings in the text are the parts worth heeding.
- Don't overwork itThis is the hinge. The dough is soft and slightly sticky by design; every extra minute of kneading or re-rolling develops gluten and gives you tough, bready crullers. Mix only until the flour disappears, and handle the scraps as little as possible.
- Flour is a range for a reasonFive to six cups is a wide spread, likely because the wetness of the sour cream and buttermilk (and of the flour itself) varied from kitchen to kitchen. Add flour until the dough just holds a shape when rolled half an inch thick and no further — err on the slack side.
- Sour milk and the sodaThe acid in genuine buttermilk or naturally soured milk is what activates the soda. Cultured buttermilk from a carton works. Fresh milk will not; if that is all you have, the leavening fails and the crullers stay dense.
- Fat temperatureAim for 365-375F on a thermometer. The book's test — flicking water into the fat — works because water sizzles violently at frying heat, but water in hot fat spits and can carry it out of the pan. A cube of bread that browns in about a minute is a safer read.
- "Let raise a few minutes"There is no yeast here; the short rest simply lets the soda begin working and the cut edges relax so the crullers puff evenly. Five minutes is plenty, and it should overlap with heating the fat, not follow it.
- Frying depth and timeTwo to three inches of fat, a few pieces at a time so the temperature does not crash. Roughly 1 1/2 to 2 minutes a side; turn once, with a fork or a spider, when the underside is well browned.
- Mace or nutmegBoth come from the same fruit, mace being the outer aril, and they are the traditional doughnut spices. Mace is the sharper, less sweet of the two; use it if you want the crullers to taste less like a modern cinnamon-sugar doughnut.
- Yield and keepingExpect three to four dozen, depending on the cutter. The stone crock is doing what a tin or covered container does now — keeping air off. Fried cake doughnuts do stay palatable for several days, though they are best the day they are made.
This comes from one of the small recipe booklets Church & Dwight distributed with Arm & Hammer bicarbonate of soda, a genre of advertising cookery that flourished from the late nineteenth century onward: real, workable recipes built so that the sponsor's product is unavoidable in every one. Soda leavening depended on an acid partner, and the sour milk or buttermilk here is not nostalgia but chemistry — before refrigeration, milk that had turned was an everyday kitchen ingredient rather than a failure. The word cruller is generally traced to the Dutch krullen, to curl, and the form arrived in America with Dutch settlers in New York; by the time this booklet was printed "cruller" had loosened to mean almost any fried sweet dough, twisted or otherwise, which is why the recipe simply says to cut it in the shape desired.