Krappels
To one quart of flour, add three tablespoonfuls of butter, three tablespoonfuls of white sugar, and a little salt, three tablespoonfuls of yeast and two well beaten eggs. Let the dough be well mixed up with a little warm water or milk, so that you can mould it thoroughly together; then cut into small pieces, mould round, open them in the middle and fill up with raspberry jam or strawberry preserves, or stewed apples or peaches. Place the krappels upon a tin to rise light, and when very light, fry them in hot lard like doughnuts and sprinkle over them while hot, white sugar with ground cinnamon mixed together.
A yeast-raised jam doughnut in the Pennsylvania German manner. The recipe assumes you know how bread dough behaves, and gives no temperature for the fat and no yield, so both need filling in.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume: a quart is about 4 cups, roughly 18 oz of modern all-purpose flour. Expect to adjust the liquid, since the original leaves the water or milk entirely to your judgment.
- Three tablespoonfuls of yeastMeasuring by the spoonful points to a liquid yeast, most likely homemade barm. One packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast does the same work for this quantity of flour.
- Frying temperature"Hot lard" for doughnuts means about 360-375F. Below that the dough soaks fat and the filling weeps; above it the outside colors before the center of a filled ball is cooked through.
- Sealing the fillingThis is the hinge. Pinch the dough firmly closed over the jam and set the krappels seam-side down, or the seam will open in the fat and the sugar will burn in the oil. A scant teaspoon of filling per piece is plenty.
- "Rise light" and "very light"The recipe calls for a rise only after shaping: leave the filled krappels on the tin until visibly puffed and slack to the touch, roughly 45 minutes in a warm room. Underproofed dough fries dense and greasy.
- FatLard gives the traditional flavor and a clean fry. Any neutral fat with a high smoke point works; butter does not.
- SugaringRoll them in the cinnamon sugar while still hot so it clings — a few minutes' delay and it will not stick.
- YieldAbout 16 to 18 doughnuts of doughnut-hole-plus size. They are at their best within a few hours; yeast doughnuts stale quickly.
Krappel is a Pennsylvania German rendering of German Kräppel or Krapfen, the general German word for a fried, often filled dough — the same family as the Berliner and the Faschingskrapfen eaten at Carnival. Fried yeast dough belonged to the pre-Lenten season in much of German-speaking Europe, when households used up fat, eggs and sugar before the fast, and the tradition carried into Pennsylvania as the Fastnacht. The filling options given here — raspberry jam, strawberry preserves, stewed apples or peaches — suggest the contents of a well-kept nineteenth-century pantry rather than a fixed recipe.