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Sour Cream Doughnuts
1 cup thick sour cream 1¾ cups sour milk 2 eggs 1 cup lightest yellow sugar 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon soda (dissolved in little hot water) 1 teaspoon cream of tartar Five Roses flour to roll.
Set dough aside in cool place for 3 Fry hours. Then roll and cut quickly. in hot fat. Do not mix too stiff.
A soft, cake-style doughnut leavened with soda and cream of tartar rather than yeast. The dough is deliberately slack, and the long chill is what makes it workable.
- The hinge: keep the dough softThe instruction not to mix too stiff is the whole recipe. The original gives no flour quantity at all; add flour only until the dough just holds together, perhaps 5 to 6 cups for this much liquid, and let the refrigerator rather than extra flour do the firming. A stiff dough gives heavy, bready doughnuts.
- Chilling timeThree hours in a cool place means thoroughly cold. Refrigerate, covered, and work with half the dough at a time, keeping the rest chilled.
- Sour cream and sour milkOld-style thick sour cream was cultured naturally and closer to today's full-fat sour cream or creme fraiche; either works. For the sour milk, use buttermilk, or stir a tablespoon or two of vinegar or lemon juice into a scant 1 3/4 cups whole milk and let it stand ten minutes.
- Soda and cream of tartarTogether these amount to homemade baking powder, though at equal measures the soda is in excess of the cream of tartar and relies on the sour milk and cream for the rest of its acid; the total lift is in the rough range of a couple of teaspoons of double-acting baking powder. Dissolving the soda in a little hot water was a common instruction of the period, generally to distribute it evenly and avoid dark specks; whisking it into the flour works as well.
- Lightest yellow sugarA very pale, lightly refined cane sugar. Light brown sugar, packed, gives the closest flavour; plain granulated sugar works but the doughnuts will taste flatter.
- FryingHot fat here means 365 to 375F. Below that the doughnuts soak; above, the outside colours before the centre sets. Fry three or four at a time so the temperature holds, about 1 1/2 minutes per side.
- Rolling and cuttingRoll about 1/2 inch thick on a lightly floured board and cut quickly, as the dough warms and softens fast. Fry the holes as well; they are the test batch that tells you if the fat is right.
- YieldExpect roughly three to four dozen doughnuts from this quantity. They are best within a few hours of frying.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour, and recipes like this one were gathered from Canadian home cooks across the country, which is why the flour is given as "to roll" rather than in cups. Sour cream and sour milk doughnuts belong to the era before commercial baking powder was universal in rural kitchens, when soda plus cream of tartar plus something acidic was the reliable way to raise a batter. Farm households had soured dairy on hand as a matter of course, and doughnut recipes were one of the standard ways to use it. The cake doughnut, cut and fried rather than raised with yeast, is generally thought to have spread through North America over the course of the nineteenth century, and had become the ordinary home version by the time this book appeared.