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Doughnuts
One egg, a cup rich milk, a cup sugar, three pints flour, three tea-spoons baking powder, (or one and a half measures Horsford's Bread Preparation). These are made richer by adding one egg, and one tea-spoon butter. - Mrs. Jenks, Bellefontaine, Ohio.
A bare-bones formula of the kind exchanged between neighbors, written for a cook who already knew what doughnut dough should feel like. Everything about frying has been left out, and the flour figure needs judgment.
- The flour is the problemThree pints is six cups, roughly 26 oz, against one cup of milk, one egg and a cup of sugar. That is far too dry to come together as written. Treat the flour as an upper limit and add it a cup at a time until the dough is soft, slightly tacky, and just barely rollable.
- Horsford's Bread PreparationAn early calcium-phosphate leavener sold by the Rumford Chemical Works, packaged as separate acid and alkaline components. Modern double-acting baking powder is a reasonable stand-in; use the three teaspoons the recipe gives first.
- No salt, no spiceNeither appears in the recipe. Add about half a teaspoon of salt, and either a whole grated nutmeg (two to three teaspoons) or a teaspoon of ground nutmeg or cinnamon, if you want the spicing common in doughnut recipes of the period.
- "Rich milk"Unhomogenized milk with the cream still in it. Whole milk with a spoonful of cream, or half-and-half thinned slightly, is the nearest equivalent.
- Frying, which the recipe omits entirelyFry in three inches of lard or neutral oil at 365-375F. Below that they soak grease; above it the outside colors before the center sets. Two to three minutes total, turning once when the underside is deep gold.
- Rolling and cuttingRoll about a third of an inch thick and cut with a floured doughnut cutter. Let the cut rings rest a few minutes before frying so the surface dries slightly, which limits splattering and grease absorption.
- The "richer" versionThe second egg and teaspoon of butter make a cakier, more tender doughnut that browns faster. Watch the oil temperature more closely with that version.
- YieldAbout two to two and a half dozen doughnuts plus holes, depending on cutter size. Best within a few hours of frying.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) came out of Ohio Methodist church circles, and its recipes carry the names and towns of the women who contributed them — Mrs. Jenks of Bellefontaine here — which is why they read like notes passed between people who already shared a kitchen vocabulary. The doughnut chapter sits at a hinge in American baking: yeast-raised "olykoeks," generally traced to Dutch settlement in the Hudson Valley, were giving way to quick doughnuts leavened chemically, first with saleratus and sour milk, then with the manufactured powders that arrive in this book by brand name. Horsford's Bread Preparation, made by the Rumford Chemical Works in Rhode Island, was among the most heavily advertised of them, and its appearance as an alternative measure in a home recipe shows how quickly commercial leaveners had become part of ordinary household practice.