Home › Crullers and Doughnuts › Crullers and Doughnuts
Crullers and Doughnuts
To cook these properly the fat should be of the right heat. When hot enough it will cease to bubble and be perfectly still; try with a bit of the batter, and if the heat is right the dough will rise in a few seconds to the top and occasion a bubbling in the fat, the cake will swell, and the under side quickly become brown. Clarified drippings of roast meat are more wholesome to fry them in than lard. A good suet may be prepared as follows for those who are sensible enough not to like greasy doughnuts or who Hebraically oppose lard. Use only beef suet, which is quite as cheap, cleanly, and healthy. Buy from the meat markets, speaking before hand, and securing nice, whole, clean leaves, which cut up in small pieces, put into a dinner-pot, which will hold well about ten pounds. Put in a pint of water, and after the first hour stir frequently; it takes about three hours with a good heat to render it. Drain through a coarse towel, and if the suet is good it will require but little squeezing, and leave but little scrap or cracklings. Put to cool in pans or jars, and you have an element into which, when well heated, you can drop the twisted goodies, with the assurance that they will not only be "done brown," but that they will emerge with a flavor and grain that will commend them to the favor of an epicure. Doughnuts thus cooked are more digestible and of better flavor than if cooked in lard, and the most fastidious will not need to peel them before eating. Make the dough as soft as it can be handled; if cut about half an inch thick, five to eight minutes will be time enough to cook, but it is better to break one open as a test. When done, drain well in a skimmer, and place in a colander. The use of eggs prevents the dough from absorbing the fat. Doughnuts should be watched closely while frying, and the fire must be regulated very carefully. When you have finished frying, cut a potato in slices and put in the fat to clarify it, place the kettle away until the fat "settles," strain into an earthen pot kept for this purpose, and set in a cool place. The sediment remaining in the bottom of the kettle may be used for soap-grease. Fry in an iron kettle, the common skillet being too shallow for the purpose. Do not eat doughnuts between April and November. Crullers are better the day after they are made. If lard is not fresh and sweet, slice a raw potato, and fry before putting in the cakes.
This is the frying-fat chapter that stands in front of the doughnut recipes, and most of it is still sound practice. The parts that need translating are the temperature test, the rendering instructions, and the frying time.
- The heat test, translated"Ceases to bubble and be perfectly still" describes water boiling out of the fat, not a temperature. Use a thermometer: 360-375F is the working range for doughnuts. Below 350F they drink fat; pushed much past 375-400F beef tallow begins to smoke and the outside colours before the centre sets.
- Frying timeFive to eight minutes for a half-inch cake is long by current practice. At a steady 365F a half-inch doughnut takes about 1-2 minutes a side. The book's advice to break one open as a test is the right instinct regardless of the clock.
- "Leaves" of suetLeaf fat is the hard, sheet-like kidney fat, not trimmings. Ask a butcher for beef leaf fat or kidney suet; ten pounds is a great deal for a home kitchen and two or three pounds renders down comfortably in a heavy pot.
- Rendering methodThe pint of water keeps the fat from scorching before it starts to melt and boils off on its own. Keep the heat low, not "good" — you want the fat clear and pale, and any browning of the cracklings carries into the flavour. Three hours is realistic for a large batch; a small one is done in one.
- Yield and keepingRendered suet gives roughly three-quarters of its raw weight in usable tallow. It keeps for months refrigerated and much longer frozen; the original's "cool place" assumed a cellar, and tallow left at room temperature will eventually go rancid.
- Clarified drippingsRoast-meat drippings today usually carry salt, pan juices and browned bits, all of which burn at frying heat. Strain and settle them as described, discard the dark layer at the bottom, and expect a shorter frying life than clean tallow.
- The potato trickSlices of raw potato are traditionally said to pull some off-flavour and suspended matter out of used fat, and it is harmless to try. It will not rescue fat that has darkened, thickened or begun to smell fishy -- that fat should be discarded.
- Depth, not just diameterThe instruction to use a kettle rather than a skillet is about safe headroom. Three inches of fat in a pot deep enough that the fat sits no more than halfway up the sides keeps the boil-over from becoming a fire.
- "Do not eat doughnuts between April and November"A piece of nineteenth-century dietary lore, probably tied to the belief that heavy fried food was unwholesome in warm weather and to the difficulty of keeping stored fat sweet in a summer kitchen. Disregard it.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping came out of Ohio in the 1870s, compiled from the contributions of many household cooks, and this passage is characteristic of it: the recipes proper are elsewhere, and the frying fat gets attention in its own right, fat being an expensive, reusable household asset that had to be made rather than bought. Doughnuts themselves are generally traced to the Dutch olykoek, "oil cake," carried into American cookery through New York and New England, and cruller comes from the Dutch krullen, to curl — hence the "twisted goodies" of the text. The aside about those who "Hebraically oppose lard" is a small window on the period: beef suet is offered as a substitute both for Jewish households avoiding pork and for cooks who simply thought lard-fried cakes greasy, an argument about texture and digestibility that ran through American cookbooks for the rest of the century.