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Molasses Doughnuts
1 cup molasses 2 cups buttermilk 2 eggs 1 teaspoon ginger 2 teaspoons melted butter Five Roses flour to make soft dough.
Do not knead, but pat lightly with the hands. Roll out and fry in hot lard.
These are delicious.
A terse flour-company formula that assumes the cook already knows how a doughnut dough should feel. Two things need settling before you start: the missing leavening and the amount of flour.
- The missing sodaAs printed there is no leavening at all, yet the recipe is built on two acidic ingredients, molasses and buttermilk. Comparable recipes of the period generally carry baking soda, commonly somewhere between 1/2 and 1 teaspoon per cup of buttermilk, sifted with the flour; without it the doughnuts fry up dense and heavy.
- "Flour to make soft dough"No quantity is given and none can be reconstructed reliably; add flour gradually. The dough should be soft enough to sag but firm enough to lift off the board with a bench scraper. Stop as soon as it holds a shape; more flour buys easier handling and costs you tenderness.
- Five Roses flourA hard-wheat Canadian all-purpose flour milled by Lake of the Woods Milling Company. Ordinary all-purpose flour is the right substitute; if you use bread flour, hold back a little, as it will absorb more liquid.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses or a mild fancy molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter than what was meant and will dominate the ginger.
- Do not kneadThe instruction is the hinge of the recipe. Patting the dough out by hand rather than working it keeps the crumb short; kneading develops gluten and produces tough, bready rings that also drink more fat.
- Thickness and cuttingRoll or pat to about 3/8 inch. Cut with a floured doughnut cutter and let the rings rest a few minutes before frying so the surface dries slightly.
- Frying temperature"Hot lard" is left undefined; the modern working equivalent for doughnuts is about 365-375F on a thermometer, with at least 2 inches of fat. Molasses doughs brown quickly because of the sugar, so at higher heat the outside colours before the centre sets. Fry roughly 1 1/2 to 2 minutes a side, turning once.
- Fat and drainingLard gives the cleanest flavour and was the default; refined vegetable shortening or a neutral oil works. Drain on a rack rather than paper so steam escapes and the crust stays crisp.
- YieldA large batch; the exact count depends on how much flour the dough takes and on cutter size. They are best the day they are made.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg and distributed with sacks of its Five Roses flour; the recipes were solicited from Canadian housewives, which explains the clipped, conversational style and the assumption that a cook knows how much flour "a soft dough" needs. Molasses was the everyday sweetener across much of eastern Canada well into the twentieth century, arriving in quantity through Atlantic ports from the Caribbean trade and costing less than refined sugar, so it turns up constantly in the region's cakes, cookies, brown bread and doughnuts. Pairing it with buttermilk and ginger is thoroughly of that tradition: the sour milk supplied the acid that made soda work, and ginger was the cheap warming spice of choice.