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Old Fashioned Raised Doughnuts
To one pint of bread sponge add one-half cup melted lard, onehalf teaspoon soda, one cup white sugar, two eggs, one-half teaspoon mace, one-half nutmeg, one teaspoon cinnamon, a little salt; mix in a soft dough, let it rise, knead down, let it rise again, then knead and roll out in small round cakes; fry in hot lard and sugar while warm.
This is a yeast doughnut built on a piece of the morning's bread sponge, so the recipe assumes a household already baking bread. The flour quantity is never given, which is the main thing standing between the text and a working dough.
- Bread spongeA pint (2 cups) of the loose, bubbly flour-water-yeast batter set the night before for bread, well risen and still active. Lacking one, a sponge of about 1 cup water or milk, 1 3/4 cups flour and a teaspoon of instant yeast, left until foamy and domed, stands in for it.
- The missing flourNo flour is specified for the dough itself, because the cook was expected to judge it. Work in flour only until the dough is soft and just short of sticky, roughly 3 to 4 cups; a stiff dough here fries heavy and dry.
- Why the sodaThe half teaspoon of soda is not a leavener so much as a corrective, neutralising the acidity a long-standing sponge develops. Keep it even if your sponge is young and mild.
- Half a nutmegThat means half a whole nutmeg, grated, which comes to roughly 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons of ground. With the mace and cinnamon this is a firmly spiced doughnut by modern standards.
- Lard, in both placesHalf a cup melted and cooled in the dough, and several inches more in the pot. Lard fries cleanly at doughnut temperatures and gives a short crumb; shortening or a neutral oil substitutes for the frying fat, and melted butter can replace the lard in the dough with a slight loss of tenderness.
- Hot lard, measured365 to 375F. Below that the dough drinks fat and goes greasy; above it the outside colours before the middle sets. Fry two to three minutes total, turning once, and let the fat recover between batches.
- The second rise, after cuttingThe recipe says rise, knead down, rise, then roll and cut. Give the cut rounds another 20 to 30 minutes on the board until visibly puffed before they go into the fat, or they will be dense.
- Rolling and shapeAbout half an inch thick. "Small round cakes" most likely means plain rounds rather than rings, though the text does not say; cut a hole if you prefer, as plain rounds cook through at this thickness.
- Sugaring and yieldRoll in granulated sugar while still warm, not hot, so it clings without melting to syrup. Expect roughly two to three dozen depending on the cutter.
Raised doughnuts of this kind are a by-product of household bread baking: the cook who kept a sponge going for daily loaves had a ready leavener, and a pint of it diverted on frying day cost nothing extra. The older American doughnut was commonly yeast-raised in this way, and the quicker chemically leavened cake doughnut is generally said to have spread later, as baking powder and saleratus came into wider use. The heavy hand with nutmeg and mace is characteristic of the period; both were cheap by then and were considered proper to any fried sweet dough.