Home › Doughnuts and Crullers › Jersey Wonders
Jersey Wonders
1 pound Five Roses flour ¼ pound butter ¼ pound sifted sugar 4 eggs 2 teaspoons baking powder (more, if desired).
Beat eggs light and mix with sugar and butter. Sift in the flour and baking powder. Allow to rise. Then roll out thin and cut out about 3 inches square. Make 3 slits across each, and fry until brown in hot lard.
A stiff egg-rich dough, rolled thin and fried — closer to a fritter than a raised doughnut. Two things in the wording will mislead a modern cook: "allow to rise" and the thickness of the roll.
- "Allow to rise" means rest, not fermentThere is no yeast here, only baking powder, so nothing will visibly rise. Cover the dough and let it sit 30 minutes so the gluten relaxes and the flour hydrates; it rolls out far more willingly afterwards.
- Weights to cupsA pound of flour is roughly 3½ to 4 cups (450 g); ¼ pound of butter is half a cup (1 stick, 115 g); ¼ pound of sifted sugar is a scant ⅔ cup. Weighing the flour matters more than usual, as the only liquid is four eggs and the dough is meant to be firm.
- Roll it genuinely thinAbout ⅛ inch. These are supposed to puff and blister into hollow, crisp shapes; dough rolled thick fries to a heavy, cakey slab with a raw seam in the middle.
- The slitsThree cuts across each square, as the recipe directs; they help the thin dough fry evenly rather than lift unevenly off the fat. Jersey wonders are also commonly shaped by pulling one end of the dough through a central slit to make a twist, though this recipe does not tell you to do so.
- Fat temperatureLard at 360–375F. Cooler and the dough drinks fat; hotter and the outside browns before the inside sets. A neutral oil with a high smoke point behaves the same way if you would rather not render lard.
- Frying timeRoughly a minute a side at that heat — the pieces are thin and cook fast. Fry in small batches so the fat does not drop below temperature, and drain on a rack rather than paper so the undersides stay crisp.
- Finishing and yieldThe dough is only lightly sweetened; a dusting of caster or granulated sugar while still warm is traditional. Yield depends entirely on how thin you roll: at 3 inches square and thinly rolled, expect several dozen pieces from a pound of flour. Eat them the day they are made.
Jersey Wonders — des mèrvelles in Jèrriais, the Norman French of the island — are the best-known baking of Jersey in the Channel Islands, where they were fried in batches for family gatherings and sold at fairs. They belong to the same wide European family as the twisted, thin-rolled fried doughs found from Scandinavian klenäter to Italian cenci, all of them shaped so the piece cooks through in a minute or two of frying. Island tradition holds that wonders should only be fried on an outgoing tide, or the fat will boil over — a claim recorded often enough to be worth repeating, though it is folklore rather than physics. Its appearance in a Canadian flour company's cookbook is a reminder of how far Channel Island families spread through the North Atlantic fisheries and into Quebec and the Maritimes, carrying their recipes with them; the compilers of promotional cookbooks like this one gathered contributions from readers across the country, and regional survivals of this kind turn up alongside the plainer doughnuts and crullers.