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DOUGH NUTS, AMERICAN (another way)
Rub four ounces of butter into three pounds of fine flour; add one pound of sugar, a tea-spoonful of powdered cinnamon, and a whole nutmeg, grated. Whisk four eggs, and mix them gradually with a gill of yeast and as much of a pint of new milk, flavoured with rose-water, as will make the flour into a soft dough. Cover it up, warm to rise, and when sufficiently risen make it into balls, or into any form liked, and drop them into a saucepan of boiling lard. When of a fine brown colour they are done, and should be laid before the fire on a sieve to dry. It sometimes happens that the nuts are insufficiently cooked in the middle. To ensure their being done thoroughly, drop them into the lard as soon as it boils. Time to boil, five or six minutes. Probable cost for the above ingredients, 2s. 6d. to 3s.
A yeast-raised doughnut on a Victorian scale: three pounds of flour will give you something like four dozen. The quantities divide cleanly by four for a household batch.
- A gillAn imperial gill is 5 fl oz, a little over half a cup. Here it measures liquid barm or brewer's yeast, not a modern concentrated product.
- Yeast substitutionA gill of barm is roughly equivalent to 2 teaspoons of instant dried yeast for the full 3 lb of flour, or half a teaspoon if you quarter the recipe. Add the dried yeast to the flour and make up the lost liquid with more milk.
- "Boiling lard"Fat does not boil; the word means shimmering and hot. Work at 350-360F. Any hotter and a sweet, enriched dough this rich will brown before the centre sets, which is exactly the failure the recipe warns about.
- The real fix for raw centresDropping them in "as soon as it boils" probably amounts to a warning against letting the fat overheat, though the recipe does not say so. A thermometer does the job better, along with keeping the balls small enough for heat to reach the middle.
- TimingFive or six minutes suits large balls in fat below modern frying temperature. At 350-360F, doughnuts of 1.5 to 2 inches take 2 to 3 minutes, turned once.
- New milk and rose-waterNew milk is simply fresh whole milk; warm it to blood heat to help the dough rise. Rose-water is still sold in Middle Eastern groceries and by good grocers; a teaspoon or two per pint is enough, as it turns soapy in quantity.
- A sweet, slow doughA pound of sugar to three pounds of flour will retard the yeast noticeably. Expect a first rise of two hours or more in a warm place, and do not judge it by the clock.
- Draining"Before the fire on a sieve" means drain and dry in warm moving air. A wire rack over a tray in a low oven, door ajar, does the same without steaming the crust soft.
- YieldThe full quantity makes roughly 48 to 60 doughnuts. They are at their best within a few hours of frying and stale quickly, as all yeast-raised doughnuts do.
Cassell's files this under "American" because that is what it was to a British reader of the 1870s: a foreign novelty, worth a heading of its own. The dish itself is generally traced to the Dutch olykoek or oil-cake carried to New Amsterdam, and the yeast-raised, spiced, nutmeg-heavy dough here is much closer to that ancestor than to the baking-powder cake doughnut that came to dominate American kitchens later. Note that there is no hole; the ring shape, often said to have been devised to cure precisely the raw-centre problem this recipe frets over, is not yet standard, and Cassell's solution is instead to manage the temperature of the lard. Rose-water alongside cinnamon and nutmeg is an older English habit that survived longest in sweet fried and baked goods, and it dates this version as firmly as the price in shillings does.