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German Doughnuts
Scald 1 pint milk; pour hot over 1 pint flour, and beat till smooth; add 1/2 teaspoonful salt, and let cool. Add beaten yolks 4 eggs, 1 tablespoonful melted butter, 1 teaspoonful flavoring, 1/2 cupful sugar, beaten whites of eggs, 1 cupful flour mixed with 2 teaspoonfuls baking-powder, and more flour to make a soft dough. Roll, cut, and fry.
A scalded-milk batter thickened with flour before the eggs go in, which gives a doughnut closer to a soft cake than a stiff rolled dough. The hinge is temperature control: the paste must be fully cool before the yolks are added, and the fat must hold steady while frying.
- Pint measuresFlour was sold and measured by volume here: 1 pint flour is 2 cups, roughly 8 to 9 oz. The milk is a true liquid pint, 2 cups. The later addition is 1 cup flour with the baking powder, plus whatever more the dough needs.
- Cool the pasteScalding the milk into the flour makes a thick, glossy paste. Let it come down to room temperature before adding the yolks, or they will scramble and the dough will be flecked and grainy.
- Beaten whitesThe recipe assumes the whites of the same 4 eggs, beaten to soft peaks and folded in after the sugar. Fold rather than stir, and add the flour and baking powder last with a light hand.
- FlavoringAn unspecified teaspoonful in a book of this date usually means vanilla or lemon extract; nutmeg or a little grated lemon zest suits the dough equally well.
- Baking powder, not yeastDespite the name, nothing here is raised with yeast, so there is no proofing.
- A soft dough needs coldThis will be slacker than a standard doughnut dough. Chill it 30 to 60 minutes and flour the board and cutter generously; roll about 1/2 inch thick rather than thinner.
- Frying fatHold the fat at 365 to 375F. Below that the doughnuts absorb grease, above it the outsides colour before the centre of a soft, rich dough is set. Two to three minutes total, turning once.
- YieldExpect roughly 24 to 30 doughnuts of ordinary size from this quantity. Drain on a rack rather than paper, and roll in sugar while still warm if you want them coated.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks labelled a great many things "German" on the strength of one detail, and here it may be the scalded flour-and-milk base, a technique shared with the cooked pastes behind some German and Central European fried pastries. The genuinely German fried doughnut, the Berliner or Krapfen, is typically a yeast-raised, filled ball with no rolling and cutting at all, so this recipe sits closer to the American cake doughnut in shape and method while borrowing the richer, wetter dough. Chemical leavening had made fried cakes an everyday project rather than a yeast-day one.