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Maryland Dough Nuts
Break an egg into a bowl. Beat it well, and mix with it half a pint of melted butter, half a pint of sugar, half a pint of sour milk, a tea-spoonful of cinnamon, half a tea-spoonful of powdered cloves, and nine ounces of dried flour. Mix thoroughly, stir in a tea-spoonful of soda dissolved in a tea-spoonful of boiling water, and work in another nine ounces of flour. Roll the paste to the thickness of half an inch; cut it into rounds, and fry these in plenty of boiling fat.
A sour-milk-and-soda doughnut of the older American type, rich with butter and spiced rather than sweetened heavily. Cassell's gives weights for the flour and volumes for everything else, which needs some translating.
- Half a pintCassell's is a British book, so its pint is 20 fl oz and half a pint is 10 fl oz, or 1¼ US cups. If you read it as an American half-pint you get 1 cup; either works, but keep all four half-pints on the same scale.
- That much butterTen fluid ounces of melted butter is roughly 9 oz by weight against 18 oz of flour — a very rich dough that will be soft and slack. Chill it thoroughly before rolling or it will be unmanageable.
- Sour milkCultured buttermilk is the direct modern stand-in. Its acid is what activates the soda; plain sweet milk will leave the doughnuts flat and faintly soapy.
- Dried flourFlour set near the fire or in a warm oven to drive off damp, standard practice when flour was stored in sacks in cold larders. Modern bagged flour needs no drying; just weigh out 9 oz, then the second 9 oz, for 18 oz (about 4 cups) total.
- SodaBicarbonate of soda, not baking powder. Dissolving it in boiling water was presumably to disperse it evenly; once it is in, work quickly, because the rise begins in an acidic batter.
- No saltThe original omits it, as many nineteenth-century recipes did when salted butter was assumed. A half teaspoon is worth adding if your butter is unsalted.
- Boiling fatFry at 360-370F. Below that the rich dough drinks fat; above it the outsides colour before the centre of a half-inch round is set. Two to three minutes, turning once.
- Yield and finishingTwo to three dozen rounds at 2½ inches, depending on how the scraps are re-rolled. Rings are optional here — the instruction is simply to cut rounds. Roll them in cinnamon sugar while still warm.
Fried sweetened dough is generally traced to Dutch settlers in America as olykoek, "oil cake", and by the mid-nineteenth century the doughnut was thoroughly domesticated in American cookbooks, usually leavened with sour milk and saleratus rather than yeast. Regional labels like "Maryland" attached themselves loosely to such recipes and rarely denote anything documented about the state. What is genuinely of its period is the chemistry: the pairing of soured milk with bicarbonate of soda was the standard quick leavening before commercial baking powder became cheap and reliable, and the heavy spicing with cinnamon and cloves follows an older tradition of fried cakes eaten at holidays.