Home › Cookies-Doughnuts › Fried Cakes (T nutmeg t baking powder C)
Fried Cakes (T nutmeg t baking powder C)
12 t nutmeg 4 t baking powder 3½ C flour ½ t salt Roll out, cut with doughnut cutter and fry in deep fat. Mrs. Carl Schreck. ¾ lb. butter or lard Salt
This entry has come through in damaged form: the ingredient list is scrambled, quantities have lost their fractions, and the wet ingredients are missing entirely. Treat it as a skeleton of a standard church-supper cake doughnut rather than a working formula.
- The list is incompleteThere is no sugar, no egg, and no milk or buttermilk, yet the dough is meant to be rolled and cut. As printed the recipe cannot produce a doughnut; a full cake-doughnut recipe is needed to fill the gaps.
- Garbled quantityThe fat is correctly given as ¾ lb. butter or lard, as printed. "12 t nutmeg" remains odd and is almost certainly ½ teaspoon, or possibly 1 teaspoon, with the fraction bar lost in printing; do not scale from that number as it stands.
- Salt appears twice"1½ t salt" in the list and a bare "Salt" at the end are probably the same item, duplicated in the scrambling. For 3½ cups flour, ½ to 1 teaspoon is normal; 1½ teaspoons is on the salty side unless unsalted lard is used.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to 3½ cups flour is high by present-day standards; modern practice for this much flour is closer to 2½ to 3 teaspoons.
- "Fry in deep fat"No temperature or test is given. Use a thermometer: 365-375F, in batches, so the fat does not drop below 350F and the cakes do not soak.
- Rolling thicknessCake doughnut dough is soft and should be rolled about ⅜ inch thick and handled minimally. Overworking it, or rerolling the scraps more than once, makes the finished cakes tough and greasy.
- YieldA 3½-cup flour batch of cut doughnuts gives roughly 18 to 24 rings plus holes, depending on cutter size.
"Fried cakes" was an everyday name for the cake doughnut, raised with baking powder rather than yeast, and it turns up in community cook books of the early twentieth century. Nutmeg is the signature: it is the spice of the American cake doughnut almost to the exclusion of anything else, and its presence here identifies the recipe even with the rest of the list mangled. Books like this one were compiled by subscription, each contributor sending in a favorite over her own name. Fractions were the first casualty, which is why so many surviving community recipes read, like this one, as impossible arithmetic: readings such as "12" for ½ and "34" for ¾ are the signature of digitisation dropping the fraction bars.