Crullers
Add to doughnut mixture two tablespoons butter.
Roll one quarter inch thick. Cut in pieces four inches long and two inches wide. Make two slits in each, twist slightly, and fry in hot fat. 1½ cups butter
This is a variation entry, not a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have the book's doughnut dough in front of you and simply enriches and reshapes it. A few things need translating.
- The stray line at the endThe trailing "1½ cups butter" is almost certainly a compositor's error or a fragment of the neighboring recipe carried over in the setting. Taken literally it contradicts the opening instruction to add two tablespoons of butter. Use the two tablespoons.
- The base doughEverything depends on the doughnut mixture printed elsewhere in the same section; the page itself does not say whether it is raised or chemically leavened. Work the extra butter in while the dough is still soft, before the final flouring, or it will streak.
- Fat temperature"Hot fat" in a 1900s fried-cake recipe means about 365-375F. Cooler and the strips drink fat; hotter and the outside colors before the center sets. A thermometer replaces the old bread-cube test entirely.
- Thickness matters more than shapeA quarter inch is deliberate. These are cut wider and longer than a doughnut ring, so a thicker roll leaves raw dough in the middle of the twist.
- Slitting and twistingCut the two slits lengthwise, leaving both ends joined, then pull one end through or give the strip a half turn. Twist lightly — a tight twist closes the slits and the crullers fry solid rather than open and lacy.
- Chilling helpsButter-enriched dough is slack. Ten minutes in the refrigerator after cutting keeps the twists from relaxing flat when they hit the fat.
"Cruller" comes into American English from the Dutch krullen, to curl, and the shape is the whole point of the name: a strip of dough slit and turned so it fries into a twist rather than a ring. The form traveled with Dutch settlers to New York and by the late nineteenth century had become a fixture of American cookbooks, often appearing alongside the doughnut recipe as it does here, since the dough is the same one enriched with a little more butter. Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it set its promotional chocolate recipes within a full general household repertoire — which is why a plain fried cake with no cocoa in it turns up at all.