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Puff Doughnuts
MRS. C. V. PosT.
One egg, one-half cup sugar, one cup milk, one teaspoon baking powder sifted with one cup flour, a little salt, nutmeg to flavor; add more flour until spoon stands up straight; drop from spoon in hot fat-only little on spoon, it puffs up so. Put spoon in hot fat each time before taking dough, then it won't stick.
— Mrs. H. Leroy Austin
A drop doughnut rather than a rolled and cut one: the batter goes straight from spoon to fat, so there is no rolling, chilling or cutter work. The whole recipe hinges on batter consistency and fat temperature.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe says only "hot fat." By modern doughnut practice that is usually taken as somewhere around 365-375F: much cooler and the batter soaks grease and stays pale in the middle, much hotter and the outside colours before the puff has cooked through. A thermometer helps, and let the fat recover between batches.
- Reading "spoon stands up straight"A common period way of describing a stiff drop batter: thick enough to hold the spoon upright, not pourable and not kneadable. Starting from one cup of flour against a cup of milk, expect to add a good deal more -- how much depends on your flour and the size of the egg -- and judge by the spoon rather than by a figure.
- Adjust the leaveningOne teaspoon of baking powder is measured against the first cup of flour only. If you end up adding a second cup, adding another teaspoon keeps the proportion, or the doughnuts risk being dense rather than puffed. Modern baking powders are generally reckoned stronger than many of those sold when this was written, so it is worth not going much beyond about 1 teaspoon per cup.
- The greased-spoon trickDipping the spoon in the hot fat before each scoop is genuinely effective — the film of fat releases the batter cleanly. Two spoons, one to scoop and one to nudge the dough off, works even better.
- Size and turningKeep the drops small, as the recipe asks ("only little on spoon, it puffs up so"). Balls roughly the size of a walnut take about three minutes in all, turning once or twice; they often roll over on their own as the underside sets.
- Nutmeg"Nutmeg to flavor" in a batter this size means about a quarter teaspoon, freshly grated. Pre-ground nutmeg loses most of its aroma within a few months, and this is a recipe where it is the only flavouring beyond sugar.
- Finishing and yieldFinishing -- Drain on paper or a rack, then roll in granulated or cinnamon sugar while still hot so it adheres. Yield depends entirely on how much flour you end up adding and how small the drops are; small spoonfuls will make well over two dozen. They are best eaten soon after frying.
Drop doughnuts of this kind — sometimes called puffs, puff balls, or in later cookbooks simply "doughnut drops" — were the quick everyday version of the rolled and cut doughnut, and they belong to the chemically leavened baking that took over American home kitchens after commercial baking powders became widely available in the second half of the nineteenth century. A yeasted or hand-cut doughnut wants planning; this one wants a bowl, a spoon and a kettle of fat, which is exactly why it turns up in a community collection like this. The attribution is doubled: the header credits Mrs. C. V. Post while the signature at the end belongs to Mrs. H. Leroy Austin, though it is not clear why — the header may simply belong to an adjacent recipe. Nutmeg as the sole spice is often said to be the older American habit, long before cinnamon sugar became the default coating.