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Doughnuts Without Eggs
6 cups Five Roses flour 2 cups sugar 1 cup cream 1 cup skim milk 2 teaspoons cream of tartar 1 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon salt.
Sift the cream of tartar, soda and salt with the flour. Dissolve the sugar in the cream and skim milk. Add the nutmeg and pour into the flour, forming all into a dough.
Roll out, cut and fry.
A plain sour-cream-style doughnut leavened with cream of tartar and soda instead of eggs. Two things need attention before you start: the nutmeg is called for in the method but missing from the ingredient list, and the frying fat is not mentioned at all.
- The missing nutmegThe method says to add nutmeg but the list omits it. For six cups of flour, a rounded teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg sifted in with the dry ingredients is in keeping with doughnuts of this period.
- The missing fatNo frying medium is given; the recipe simply takes one for granted, and lard would have been the usual choice in this kind of book. Any neutral fat with a high smoke point works; you need enough depth that the doughnuts float and turn, roughly three inches in a heavy pot.
- Frying temperatureHold the fat at 365-375F. Below that the dough drinks fat and goes heavy; above it the outside colours before the crumb sets around the hole. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTwo teaspoons cream of tartar to one of soda is the classic homemade baking powder ratio, and the acid begins reacting as soon as it meets the liquid. Mix, roll, cut and fry without delay; dough left standing will lose some of its lift.
- The cream"Cream" in an early twentieth-century Canadian kitchen generally meant something richer than today's table cream, nearer to heavy or whipping cream. Skim milk was the by-product of separating it, so the pairing would have been what was on hand at a farm; whole milk in place of both is an acceptable substitution.
- Liquid may need adjustingTwo cups of liquid to six cups of flour makes a very stiff dough, though the two cups of sugar dissolved into it add bulk and moisture as they melt. Add milk a spoonful at a time until the dough is soft enough to roll at about half an inch but still handles without sticking.
- SweetnessTwo cups of sugar is high by modern standards and these will brown quickly in the fat. Reducing to a cup and a half gives a doughnut closer to current expectations and less prone to scorching.
- YieldA six-cup batch cut at about three inches gives roughly three to four dozen doughnuts plus holes. Halve it unless you are feeding a crowd; they are best the day they are made.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed to purchasers of its flour. Eggless doughnuts belong to a long tradition of thrift baking: eggs were seasonal and their price rose sharply in winter, while cream and skim milk were both on hand in any household that kept a cow or bought from a separator dairy. Cream of tartar and soda mixed at the moment of baking predate reliable commercial baking powder and persisted in home recipes long after tinned powder was available. The nutmeg is often said to be the defining flavour of the North American cake doughnut, a signature it is generally held to have kept from the nineteenth century to the present.