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Corn Meal Doughnuts
A tea-cup and a half boiling milk poured over two tea-cups meal; when cool add two cups flour, one of butter, one and one-half of sugar, three eggs; flavor with nutmeg or cinnamon; let rise till very light; roll about half an inch thick, cut in diamond shape, and boil in hot lard.
A scalded cornmeal dough, fried rather than baked, from the doughnut chapter of a book that assumed a cook could fill in the gaps. Two of those gaps matter here.
- The missing leavenThe instruction to "let rise till very light" implies yeast, but none is listed and none of the ingredients will raise the dough on their own. Buckeye Cookery leans on its readers to know that a rising dough needs a yeast cake or a cup of soft yeast sponge; without one, this sits inert. Expect to add about 2 teaspoons instant yeast, or to treat it as a chemically leavened dough with 2 teaspoons baking powder and skip the rise entirely.
- Tea-cup versus cupThe recipe switches between "tea-cup" and "cup" in one breath, and the two may well have been meant interchangeably; where 19th-century sources do distinguish them, a tea-cup is often reckoned smaller than a coffee cup, on the order of 6 fl oz, but usage varied. The proportions are genuinely ambiguous; treat 1 1/2 tea-cups milk as 1 to 1 1/2 cups and hold back some until you see how the meal drinks it up.
- Scalding the mealPouring boiling milk over the cornmeal gelatinizes the starch and softens the grit, which is what keeps the finished doughnut from being sandy. Do not shortcut it with warm milk, and let the mush cool to blood heat before the eggs and any yeast go in.
- A cup of butterOne cup of butter to two cups flour (plus the two cups of scalded meal) is rich by modern standards and gives a slack dough that drinks frying fat. Halving it produces a dough that handles more easily.
- CornmealUse fine or medium yellow cornmeal, not coarse polenta grind and not self-rising cornmeal mix, which carries its own leavening and salt. The meal of the period was stone-ground with the germ intact, so a stone-ground bag is the nearer match.
- SaltNone is called for; butter of the period was usually salted, which may account for it. With unsalted butter add about 1/2 teaspoon.
- "Boil in hot lard"Boiling means deep-frying; the fat should be at 365-375F, deep enough for the diamonds to float free. Lard gives the cleanest flavor, but any neutral fat works. Below 350F they soak, above 390F the cornmeal outside colors before the center sets.
- Yield and eatingRoughly two to three dozen diamonds, depending on how large you cut them. Corn doughnuts stale faster than wheat ones and are best within a few hours, rolled in sugar while still warm.
Doughnuts occupy several pages of Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (Minneapolis, 1877, and its many later printings), a book compiled from recipes contributed by Ohio housekeepers, and the fried sweet dough is generally traced to a Dutch-American ancestry — oliekoek, cake fried in oil, carried into New York and then west. What makes this version American in a different way is the cornmeal: a cook working a Midwestern kitchen had corn in far greater quantity and at lower cost than wheat flour, and stretching wheat with scalded meal was routine across breads, mush, muffins and, here, the fry kettle. The yeast rise and the diamond cut both mark it as an older style of doughnut than the ring-shaped baking-powder cake doughnut that came to dominate the next century.