Nothings
Take one egg, two tablespoonfuls cream, butter the size of a walnut, flour to make the dough very stiff; work it well and roll it very thin. Cut the size of a saucer. Fry in lard and sprinkle with powdered sugar.--Mrs. T. C.
A one-egg fried pastry with no leavening and almost no sugar in the dough — everything depends on how thin you roll it. The written measures are complete except for the flour, which is left to the cook.
- Butter the size of a walnutA shelled walnut, so roughly 1 ounce, or 2 tablespoons. Softened, not melted, worked into the egg and cream.
- CreamNineteenth-century cream skimmed from unhomogenized milk was rich; heavy cream is the closest modern equivalent. Two tablespoons is all the liquid the dough gets besides the egg.
- Flour is unmeasured"Flour to make the dough very stiff" will land somewhere near 1 to 1 1/4 cups of all-purpose, but the egg size and the cream decide it. Add it in stages and stop when the dough is dry enough to roll without sticking — stiffer than pie dough, closer to noodle dough.
- Roll it very thin — the hingeThis is the whole recipe. The dough has no leavening, so if it is rolled to any real thickness it fries into a hard biscuit. Take it to the thickness of a playing card, near translucent; a pasta roller does it well.
- Cut the size of a saucerA tea saucer of the period ran about 5 to 6 inches across. Prick each round several times or cut a slit in the center, or the steam will balloon them into hollow pillows.
- Fry in lardLard at 365-375F, about an inch and a half deep. At that thinness each round takes well under a minute a side and colors fast; work in small batches and pull them pale gold. Neutral oil substitutes without complaint.
- Sugar them warmPowdered sugar clings only while the surface is still hot and faintly greasy. Drain briefly on paper, then dust.
- Yield and keepingThe number of rounds depends entirely on how thin the dough is rolled and how far the scraps are re-rolled. They are at their best crisp and soon after frying, so fry them close to serving.
"Nothings" is the plainest possible name for the plainest possible sweet: flour, an egg, a spoonful of cream, fried and sugared. Versions of it run through nineteenth-century American household books under a scatter of names — nothings, wonders, crullers — and the Scandinavian fattigmann and the Norwegian-American "nothings" of later western settlement belong to the same broad European family of thin fried festival pastries, as do the French merveilles; the lines of descent between them are not documented. Its appearance in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878-79), credited like most of that book's entries to a named contributor rather than to a professional cook, shows what such a collection was for: a recipe of four ingredients and two lines, worth writing down not because it was difficult but because the proportions were remembered rather than published. Frying in lard was unremarkable in a Virginia kitchen that rendered its own from the fall hog-killing, and powdered sugar — which by this date could be bought ready-pulverized as well as pounded and sifted at home from loaf sugar — was the finishing touch that turned a scrap of dough into company food.