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Doughnuts (Eggs beaten light cup sugar)
2 eggs beaten light 1 cup sugar 1 cup milk 2 tablespoons melted butter 3 cups Gold Medal flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon each of cinnamon and salt Have board well floured and take on it 1 large spoon of dough, kneading gently till firm enough to roll out and cut. Mix the trimmings with a fresh spoon and roll again, repeating until all are used. Cook in fat hot enough to make them rise instantly to the top.
A soft, cake-style doughnut leavened with baking powder rather than yeast. The dough is deliberately slack, which is why the recipe has you flour the board heavily and work only a spoonful at a time.
- Fat temperature"Hot enough to make them rise instantly" corresponds roughly to 365-375F. Below that they absorb grease and turn heavy; much above that the outside colors before the center sets. A thermometer removes the guesswork the recipe leaves to judgement.
- Work in small batchesThis is the hinge of the recipe. The dough is too soft to roll all at once, so you take a spoonful, knead in just enough board flour to make it rollable, cut, and repeat. Kneading the whole mass with extra flour gives tough, bready doughnuts.
- FlourGold Medal was and is an all-purpose flour; use all-purpose. Three cups will give a very sticky dough by modern measuring habits — expect to take up perhaps another half cup off the board, and stop as soon as it rolls.
- Thickness and cuttingRoll to about 3/8 inch. A cutter of roughly 2 1/2 inches with a 1-inch center suits this dough; the holes fry in about half the time and are worth cooking separately.
- Frying timeTwo to three minutes total, turning once when the underside is deep gold. Cake doughnuts crack along the seam as they rise — that is correct, not a fault.
- Fat depth and choiceThree inches of fat in a deep, heavy pot, filled no more than halfway. A cook of this period would most likely have used lard; a neutral oil with a high smoke point behaves much the same.
- Draining and finishingLift onto a rack, not paper, so steam escapes and the bottoms stay crisp. Roll in cinnamon sugar while still warm if you want them sweeter than the dough alone.
- YieldAbout 18 doughnuts plus holes. They are best within a few hours; cake doughnuts stale quickly.
Cookbooks issued by flour millers were among the most widely circulated recipe collections in America between roughly 1880 and 1930, distributed cheaply or free as advertising and written to demonstrate that the company's flour handled well in every ordinary household task. The recipe's insistence on Gold Medal flour by name is the point of the book. What distinguishes this doughnut is baking powder rather than yeast: reliable commercial baking powders, widely available from the later nineteenth century, made it possible to fry a soft dough straight from the board with no rising time, and chemically leavened "cake doughnuts" of this type became increasingly common in American cookbooks. Working the dough a spoonful at a time, kneading in only as much board flour as each piece demands, keeps total flour to a minimum and so keeps the finished doughnut tender.