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Doughnuts (Cup sugar cup sour cream)
1 cup sugar 1 cup sour cream 1 teaspoon soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 grated nutmeg 1 egg 3 cups Gold Medal flour Combine in the order given, add flour to make dough stiff enough to roll; toss one-third the mixture on floured board, knead slightly, roll out to one-fourth inch thickness; cut with doughnut cutter. Fry in deep fat, take up on a skewer and drain on brown paper. Add trimmings to half the remaining mixture, roll, shape and fry as before. Roll in powdered sugar before serving.
A plain cake doughnut leavened entirely by soda reacting with sour cream. The dough is soft and sticky by design, which is why the book has you roll it out in batches.
- "1/4 grated nutmeg"This means a quarter of a whole nutmeg, grated — roughly 1/2 to 3/4 teaspoon, not a quarter teaspoon. Grate it fresh; pre-ground nutmeg loses most of its point within a few months.
- The sour creamAt the time this meant cream left to sour naturally, thick and quite acidic. Full-fat cultured sour cream is the closest substitute and supplies the only fat in the dough. Low-fat versions give a drier, tougher doughnut; buttermilk is thinner and will change the amount of flour needed.
- Soda without acid is nothingThe teaspoon of soda depends entirely on the acidity of the cream for lift. Sift or whisk it thoroughly with the flour so it does not leave brown bitter flecks, and get the doughnuts into the fat reasonably promptly once mixed.
- Frying temperatureThe book gives no temperature; modern practice for cake doughnuts is about 365-375F. Below that the dough drinks oil and goes heavy; above it the outside colours before the centre sets. Use a thermometer and let the fat recover between batches.
- Why one-third at a timeThe dough softens and warms as it is handled, and the more it is worked the tougher it gets. Rolling and cutting in thirds, folding trimmings into the next portion, keeps the last doughnuts as tender as the first.
- DrainingBrown paper was ordinary wrapping paper, the kind then used for groceries. A wire rack set over a sheet pan drains better than paper, since the undersides do not sit in absorbed fat.
- SugaringPowdered sugar clings best when the doughnuts are still warm but no longer greasy — a few minutes on the rack. Sugared cold, it slides off; sugared straight from the fat, it dissolves into paste.
- YieldRoughly two dozen doughnuts and their holes, depending on the size of the cutter. They are at their best within a few hours and stale quickly, as cake doughnuts do.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was one of the great brand cookbooks of the early twentieth century, published by Washburn-Crosby of Minneapolis — the milling firm that later became General Mills — and given away or sold cheaply to keep the sack of flour in the pantry a Gold Medal sack. Recipes like this one, which name the brand inside the instructions, were advertising as much as instruction. The doughnut itself is older than the book by a long way: the fried sweetened dough that American cooks called a doughnut is generally traced to the Dutch oliekoek of the colonial Hudson valley, and nutmeg is the spice here, as it often is. What dates this particular recipe is the sour cream and soda. Souring cream provided the acid that the soda needed, and a cup of thick sour cream did double duty as the shortening, which is why no butter or lard appears in the ingredient list at all.