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Cream Doughnuts
Beat one cup each of sour cream and sugar and two eggs together, add level tea-spoon soda, a little salt, and flour enough to roll.-Mrs. Hattie Meade, Minneapolis, Minn.
A four-ingredient doughnut that relies entirely on the acid in sour cream to activate the soda, so the mixing and frying happen in quick succession. The original assumes the cook knows how to judge a fat kettle by eye.
- Flour enough to rollExpect roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour, added a half cup at a time. Stop while the dough is still soft and slightly tacky; a stiff dough gives heavy, bready doughnuts.
- The sour cream mattersThis needs cultured sour cream, not sweet cream gone off and not a low-fat imitation thickened with gums. Full-fat sour cream supplies both the acid the soda needs and the fat that keeps the crumb tender.
- Work fast once the soda is inThe rise here is chemical and immediate. Mix, roll, cut and fry without a long pause, or the leavening spends itself on the counter.
- Chill before rollingA soft cream dough handles far better after 30 to 60 minutes in the refrigerator. Flour the board lightly and roll to about 1/3 inch.
- Frying temperatureA bread cube browning in about a minute was a common period test for fat, usually equated with somewhere around 365-375F. Below that the doughnuts drink fat; above, the outsides color before the centers set.
- SeasoningNothing but salt is specified. A grated nutmeg or a teaspoon of cinnamon in the flour is period-appropriate if you want it.
- YieldAbout 18 to 24 doughnuts with holes, depending on cutter size. Best the day they are made; drain on paper and roll in sugar while still warm if you like.
Buckeye Cookery (first published in Ohio in 1877 and reissued in expanded editions through the 1880s) was a compiled book, and the contributor line is the point: recipes arrived by name and town from women across the Midwest, in this case Minneapolis. Sour-cream doughnuts belong to a farm-kitchen economy in which cream soured on its own schedule and had to be used, and where saleratus or soda paired with that acid was the cheapest, fastest leavening available. The distinction the period drew between crullers and doughnuts was loose but generally held that crullers were twisted or cut into strips and doughnuts were rounds, ring or solid; both were commonly fried in lard, often rendered at home. The absence of spice, glaze or any flavoring beyond salt is characteristic rather than an oversight, and the terse instruction "flour enough to roll" assumes a reader who has made the dough before and needs only the proportions.