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Plain Doughnuts (No. 1)
1 egg 1 cup sugar 1 teaspoon (small) soda 1 cup fresh sweet milk 2 cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons (small) cream of tartar Nutmeg to taste.
Beat the eggs and sugar together.
Dissolve soda in the milk and mix with above. Sift flour and cream of tartar together, beat well and add nutmeg.
Roll out as soft as can be handled. Cut with doughnut cutter and fry in hot lard.
If skimmed milk be used, add 1 teaspoon melted butter. These are excellent. I double the rule, which makes 5 dozen.
A cream-of-tartar doughnut of the type that filled Canadian farm kitchens before commercial baking powder was universal. The ingredient list as printed is jumbled — the second "1 cup sugar 2 eggs" at the end belongs at the top — and the flour quantity will not work as written.
- The flour figure is unusableTwo cups of flour against one cup of milk and two eggs gives a thick batter, not a dough that can be rolled and cut. The original almost certainly assumed the cook would add flour until the dough was, in the author's phrase, "as soft as can be handled" — expect somewhere around four to five cups in total. Add it gradually and stop at the point the dough just holds together under the rolling pin.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon soda with two of cream of tartar is homemade baking powder, equivalent to roughly four teaspoons of modern double-acting powder. If you substitute, leave out both and use the powder alone; keeping the soda as well will give a soapy, yellowish crumb.
- "Small" teaspoonsProbably a scant or level measure rather than a rounded spoonful. Level both.
- Sour vs. sweet milkThe acid here is supplied by the cream of tartar, which is presumably why fresh sweet milk is called for. Buttermilk or soured milk would throw the acid balance off and need the cream of tartar reduced or dropped.
- Skimmed milk noteThe teaspoon of melted butter compensates for missing butterfat. Whole milk needs no addition; skim or 1% does.
- Frying temperatureThe book says only "hot lard"; modern practice for cake doughnuts is 365-375F. Below that the rings drink fat and go heavy; above 385F they colour before the centre sets. A thermometer is worth more here than any other instruction, and the temperature will drop each time you add dough.
- NutmegGrate it fresh. Half to a whole teaspoon for the single batch suits this style of doughnut.
- YieldThe writer doubles the recipe for five dozen, so the rule as given makes roughly thirty doughnuts plus holes, depending on cutter size.
- HandlingWork the dough as little as possible and roll about half an inch thick. Overworked cream-of-tartar dough turns tough, and these have no long resting period to relax the gluten.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its flour, and much of its contents came from Canadian housewives who sent in their own rules — which is why this one keeps the contributor's voice intact, complete with "These are excellent" and the aside about doubling the batch. The doughnut here is a chemically leavened cake doughnut rather than the older yeast-raised sort. Commercial baking powder existed from the mid-nineteenth century, but recipes calling for separate soda and cream of tartar continued to appear well into the twentieth. Lard was the usual frying fat in a household that rendered its own pork fat, and nutmeg was a common doughnut spice.