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Twist Cakes
½ pint sour milk or buttermilk 2 cups sugar 1 cup butter 3 eggs (well beaten) 1 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon nutmeg Five Roses flour to make smooth dough.
Roll out and drop in boiling fat.
A bare-bones fried dough formula of the kind flour-mill cookbooks printed by the dozen: the flour quantity is left to the cook, and so is nearly everything about the frying. A few specifics make it workable.
- ½ pint sour milkOne cup by US measure; if the book is working in imperial pints, closer to 1¼ cups. If you have no true sour milk or buttermilk, stir a tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar into a cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes — the acid is there to react with the soda.
- "Flour to make smooth dough"Expect roughly 5 to 6 cups. Stop at a dough that is soft and just barely handleable; every extra cup of flour buys you a tougher, drier cake. Chilling the dough an hour makes rolling far easier than working in more flour.
- Mixing orderThe original gives none. Cream the butter with the sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the soured milk with the soda dissolved in it, then the nutmeg and flour last. Mix only until the flour disappears.
- Fat temperature"Boiling fat" does not mean literally boiling; standard modern practice for fried cakes is 365–375°F. Below that the dough drinks fat and goes heavy; above it the outside colours before the centre sets. Use a thermometer and let the fat recover between batches.
- The twistThe name is the shaping instruction. Roll about ⅜ inch thick, cut into strips six or seven inches long and half an inch wide, then twist each strip a few turns and pinch the ends together, or fold it and let it coil on itself. They cook in about 1½ to 2 minutes a side.
- NutmegA teaspoon is a lot by modern habit, but nutmeg was the usual spice in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fried cakes and is not a misprint here. Grate it fresh if you can; pre-ground is noticeably flatter.
- Sugar and fatTwo cups of sugar and a full cup of butter make a rich, sweet, tender dough that browns fast. Watch the colour rather than the clock.
- YieldAround three to four dozen twists, depending on how long you cut the strips. Drain on a rack, not on paper, and dust with sugar while still warm if you want them sugared.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed to Canadian households who bought its flour, which is why the ingredient list names the brand outright where any other book would say simply "flour." Recipes in it were largely collected from customers, and this one has the compressed, elliptical quality of something copied off a card: no method, no yield, no frying temperature, presumably because whoever sent it in assumed anyone reading knew how to fry a doughnut. Twisted or knotted fried cakes are old and widespread — the sour-milk-and-soda version belongs to the North American farmhouse tradition that arose once chemical leavening became cheap in the mid-nineteenth century, coexisting for decades with the yeast-raised doughnuts of earlier Dutch and English practice. Sour milk was not an affectation but a fact of a kitchen with a cow and no refrigeration: milk that had turned was a resource, and pairing it with saleratus or soda turned that acidity into lift.