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Crullers
— Mrs. Jesse Little
One cup of sugar, one-half cup of milk, one-half teaspoon of soda, two eggs, butter size of an egg, flour enough to roll out.
— Miss Kate Casey
A bare ingredient list in the community-cookbook style: it assumes you already know that crullers are rolled, cut and fried. The proportions work, but almost every instruction has been left out.
- The missing methodCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, add the milk with the soda dissolved in it, then work in flour until the dough is just stiff enough to roll. Chill it before rolling — this dough is soft and much easier to handle cold.
- Butter size of an eggUsually reckoned at about 2 ounces, roughly 1/4 cup, though estimates in period sources vary. Butter of the period came in irregular lumps and rolls rather than marked sticks, so it was commonly measured against familiar objects.
- "Flour enough to roll out"Expect roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups, but add it in stages and stop early. Excess flour is what turns crullers heavy and bready; the dough should still be slightly tacky, rolled about 1/3 inch thick.
- The soda has nothing to sourThe soda has nothing much to sour -- half a teaspoon of soda with sweet milk and no added acid can leave a faint soapy or metallic note, since milk's own slight acidity only partly neutralizes it. If your milk is not buttermilk or clabbered, substitute about 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder, or add a teaspoon or so of vinegar or lemon juice to the milk.
- Frying, unstatedFry in 2 to 3 inches of fat at 365°F, about 1 1/2 minutes a side until deep gold. Below 350°F the dough soaks up grease; above 375°F the outside colors before the center sets. Lard was the fat of the period and still gives the crispest result.
- ShapingCut into strips and twist, or into rings — "cruller" covered both. Whatever the shape, keep the pieces uniform in thickness so they cook through at the same rate.
- Seasoning it expects you to knowGrated nutmeg was a common seasoning in crullers and fried cakes of this period, and is sometimes left unstated. A quarter teaspoon of nutmeg, or nutmeg with a little cinnamon, is in keeping.
- YieldAbout two dozen, best eaten the day they are made. Roll in granulated or powdered sugar while still warm if you want them sugared.
Cruller is generally traced to the Dutch krullen, to curl, and the word entered American English through the Hudson Valley, where Dutch settlement left its mark on the local baking vocabulary — olykoek, cookie and cruller all traveled the same route. Catskill sits on the west bank of the Hudson in Greene County, squarely in that territory. The recipe's form is as telling as its contents: village church and society cookbooks collected contributions by name, and the assumption throughout is that the reader already knows how to handle a kettle of hot fat and only needs the proportions. The double attribution here — one name above the ingredients, another below — is a common artifact of these compilations; the likelier reading is that the first name belongs to the preceding receipt.