Home › Doughnuts and Crullers › Crullers
Crullers
1/2 pound sugar. 3 eggs. 1 tablespoon sweet milk 1½ ounces butter Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon soda Salt.
Mix the ingredients with enough Five Roses flour to make thick dough. Roll this out and stamp little cakes which drop into hot lard.
This entry has clearly lost part of its ingredient list in setting — a tablespoon of milk and an ounce and a half of butter will not hydrate any quantity of flour worth rolling, and there is no sugar, egg or leavening acid named. Treat it as a sketch of a method rather than a working formula, and read the neighbouring doughnut recipes in the same section for the proportions it assumes.
- The missing liquidOne tablespoon of milk cannot hydrate a rollable quantity of flour, so something has dropped out in setting: possibly a larger measure of milk, possibly eggs, possibly both. Comparable crullers of the period are generally built on several cups of flour with milk, eggs and sugar in proportion, but no reconstruction can be pinned to this text. Do not try to scale from the line as printed.
- Soda without acidA teaspoon of soda has little acid to react with in sweet (fresh) milk, and excess soda tends to leave a soapy taste and a yellow-brown cast. Contemporary books generally either pair soda with sour milk or buttermilk, or specify baking powder; a sweet-milk dough of this size would want baking powder instead.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured whole milk. The distinction mattered when kitchens kept both and the choice determined which leavener you reached for.
- Lard temperatureThe book gives no temperature. Modern practice for fried doughs of this kind is around 365-375F: much below that and the dough drinks fat and goes greasy, much above and the outside colours before the crumb sets. Any neutral frying fat with a high smoke point will substitute, and lard is still sold for the purpose.
- Stamping the cakesCrullers are distinguished from doughnuts by shape rather than dough — cut into strips and twisted, or rolled thin and cut into diamonds with a slit through the centre, one end pulled back through. The "little cakes" here suggests a plain stamped round.
- Handling the doughRoll no thinner than ⅜ inch and work it as little as possible; a soda dough toughens quickly and the cakes should be fried within a few minutes of cutting, before the leavening spends itself.
- YieldThe recipe as printed gives no basis for a yield; any figure depends on the reconstructed proportions above. Drain on paper and dust with sugar while still warm.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and distributed in enormous numbers to Canadian households from 1913 onward — a flour-company premium built from recipes solicited from customers, with ingredient lists that are terse and occasionally, as here, incomplete. Crullers arrived in North America with Dutch settlers; the name is generally traced to a Dutch word for curling or twisting, describing the shape rather than the dough. Through the nineteenth century crullers and doughnuts were made from nearly the same batter and separated mostly by how the raw piece was formed, and cookbooks of this era file them together in one chapter.