Fried Cakes
One pint warm water, one pint sweet milk, two pounds sugar, one pint lard, one pint yeast, four eggs; when light enough to mix add one nutmeg, one teaspoon soda, a little salt; when very light cut in any shape you choose and fry, after frying roll in sugar.
A yeast-raised doughnut in the old style, written for a cook who already knew what dough should feel like. The recipe never mentions flour at all, which is the first thing to reckon with.
- The missing ingredientNo flour quantity is given because the amount was judged by feel: enough to make a soft dough that pulls away from the bowl. With this much liquid — a pint of water, a pint of milk and a pint of yeast, besides a pint of lard — something in the range of 5 to 6 pounds of flour is a plausible guess. The original is genuinely indeterminate here, and only handling the dough will tell you.
- One pint of yeastThis is not packet yeast. Nineteenth-century home yeast was a liquid barm, roughly the strength of a wet sourdough starter, and a pint of it was normal. Two cups of active liquid starter is the nearest equivalent; if using dry yeast, a scant tablespoon dissolved in the warm water does the same work, with the missing pint of liquid made up by water or milk.
- Two pounds of sugarAbout 4½ cups. That is a great deal of sugar for a yeast dough and heavily sugared doughs are slow to rise; the recipe waits twice, once before mixing in the spice and soda and once after. Cutting the sugar by half gives a dough closer to a modern raised doughnut and ferments faster.
- A pint of lardTwo cups, melted, and it goes into the dough rather than the pan. The frying fat is separate and unmeasured; three to four inches of lard or a neutral oil in a deep pot.
- Sweet milkPlain unsoured whole milk. The distinction mattered in a kitchen that also kept sour milk and buttermilk for soda-leavened baking.
- Soda alongside yeastThe teaspoon of soda is not the leavening. It neutralises the acidity that builds up during a long ferment, keeping the crumb tender and the flavour from turning sharp. Do not leave it out and do not increase it, or the cakes will taste soapy.
- Frying temperature365 to 375F. Below that the dough drinks fat; above it the outside colours before the inside sets. Fry in small batches and let the fat recover between them.
- Rolling in sugarDo it while the cakes are still warm enough for the sugar to cling but not so hot that it melts into syrup — a minute or two out of the fat.
- YieldAn enormous one. This is a batch for a household or a church supper; with the flour unspecified any count is guesswork, but several dozen cakes at least. Quartering the recipe gives a manageable quantity.
Fried cakes, raised doughnuts, olykoeks — the sweet is generally traced to Dutch settlement in the Hudson Valley, though the descent is traditional attribution rather than established fact — and in any case the yeast-leavened form came well before chemically leavened cake doughnuts became the commoner one. That this one appears under Supper rather than dessert is worth noticing: in the period, supper was often the lighter evening meal, taken with tea or coffee, and sweet fried dough belonged to it as naturally as bread and cold meat. The scale of the recipe — four pints of liquid, two pounds of sugar — reflects a kitchen accustomed to frying in quantity rather than a dozen at a time. The reliance on homemade liquid yeast suggests an older domestic practice, from a time when a pint of barm was an ordinary thing to ask for, though such yeast stayed in home use for decades after compressed yeast was on sale.