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Potato Doughnuts (Eggless)
2 cups hot mashed potatoes 2 cups sugar 1 cup sweet milk 2 tablespoons butter 5 teaspoons (level) baking powder 1 teaspoon vanilla Five Roses flour to make soft dough.
Mix as usual.
Roll out inch thick.
Fry in hot grease. The potatoes keep the doughnuts soft. These keep fresh much longer than if made with eggs.
A large, old-style batch built on the moisture-holding power of potato starch rather than eggs. The flour quantity is left to the cook, so the dough is judged by feel.
- Flour, unstatedExpect roughly 5 to 6 cups of all-purpose flour to bring this to a soft, barely tacky dough. Add it in stages and stop while the dough is still slightly sticky; over-flouring is what makes potato doughnuts heavy and dry.
- The potatoesPlain boiled potatoes, riced or mashed smooth and still hot when mixed, as the recipe specifies. Cold mashed potato will not blend evenly into the batter. Two cups is roughly 1 lb of raw potato.
- Add saltThe recipe lists none, though salted butter or already-seasoned potato may account for that. About 1 teaspoon of salt in this quantity of dough keeps the sweetness from tasting flat.
- "Sweet milk"Fresh whole milk, as opposed to the soured or buttermilk called for elsewhere in these books. The distinction mattered when milk soured on its own; ordinary milk from the carton is what is wanted.
- Fat and temperature"Hot grease" meant lard or beef drippings in a deep kettle. Any neutral frying fat works, held at 365-375F. Below that the dough drinks fat; above it, the outside colors before the thick centers set.
- Rolling thicknessAn inch is thick even for a raised-looking doughnut, and with 5 teaspoons of baking powder these will swell considerably. Between 1/3 and 1/2 inch gives a doughnut that cooks through in about 3 minutes total, turned once.
- Test one firstFry a single scrap before committing the batch. If it splits open or the center stays gummy, the dough needs a little more flour or the fat is too hot.
- YieldA batch this size runs to roughly 3 to 4 dozen doughnuts. Halve it unless you are feeding a crowd, since they are best the first day despite the keeping claim.
- Why they keepGelatinized potato starch holds water far longer than a flour-and-egg crumb, which is the whole point of the recipe. They stay soft two or three days in a tin, though they never re-crisp.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal to promote its Five Roses flour, and it was assembled largely from recipes sent in by home cooks across Canada. The instructions assume you already know how to mix a doughnut dough and simply say "mix as usual." Potato doughnuts belong to a long thrift tradition of stretching wheat flour with cooked potato, and the eggless version had a particular logic in a country household: eggs were seasonal and scarce in winter, while potatoes kept in the cellar until spring. The note that they "keep fresh much longer than if made with eggs" is the real selling point, aimed at a cook baking once a week rather than daily. The same principle survives in the American spudnut of the mid-twentieth century, generally traced to commercial bakeries of the 1940s, but the household practice is considerably older than any brand name attached to it.