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Fried Cakes (T soda t baking powder Pinch)
1 t butter. 1 t soda 1 t baking powder Pinch salt Cream sugar, butter and eggs together. Add milk, soda, baking powder and salt, and enough flour to roll nicely. 1 C sugar ½ t salt - nutmeg 2 eggs nutmeg 1 C sweet milk
The ingredient list has been scrambled in the original printing, and the frying instructions — the whole point of a fried cake — are missing entirely. What follows fills in what a cook of the period would have taken for granted.
- The list is incompleteButter is called for in the method but no quantity appears anywhere on the page. Something in the range of 2 to 4 tablespoons would suit a batch built on 1 cup sugar and 1 cup milk; much more and the dough turns greasy in the kettle.
- Reading the abbreviationsT is tablespoon, t is teaspoon, C is cup. Here the title says T soda but the body says 1 t soda — take the teaspoon. A tablespoon of soda against a single cup of milk would be soapy and green-tasting.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which were also used as baking liquids. Do not substitute buttermilk without dropping the baking powder and leaning on the soda.
- Enough flour to roll nicelyExpect roughly 3½ to 4 cups. The dough should be soft and slightly tacky rather than stiff; over-flouring is the usual cause of heavy, bready doughnuts. Chilling it an hour makes it far easier to handle.
- Frying, which the recipe omitsFry in deep fat at 365–375F, two to three minutes, turning once. Below 360F the cakes absorb grease; above 385F they brown before the centre sets. Fry in small batches so the fat temperature does not crash.
- Nutmeg appears twiceAn artifact of the printing, not a doubled quantity, since no amount is given either time. Half a teaspoon of grated nutmeg is a reasonable proportion for this size batch.
- YieldAbout two dozen doughnuts rolled a scant half-inch thick and cut with a 2½-inch cutter, plus the holes. Best eaten the day they are made; they stale quickly.
"Fried cakes" was the everyday name for what most cookbooks now call a cake doughnut — leavened with soda and baking powder rather than yeast, so it could be mixed, rolled and fried in under an hour without waiting on a rise. Chemical leavening made the form possible: soda is generally said to have been in general kitchen use since the mid-nineteenth century, and commercial baking powder spread widely after the 1860s, which is why recipes of this kind often call for both. Compilations of this sort were assembled from contributors' recipes, which may account for the jumbled ingredient list here and the assumption that no one needed telling how to manage a kettle of hot lard. Nutmeg is the characteristic spice in these recipes.