Doughnuts
1 cup milk 4½ cups flour 1 teaspoon soda 2 teaspoons cream of tartar few gratings of nutmeg Beat eggs; add sugar, dry ingredients sifted, and milk. Beat well. Add flour to make a soft dough. Chill over night if possible.
Roll to one inch thickness; cut with doughnut cutter; fry in hot fat, turning often. Drain on brown paper.
The ingredient list as printed is incomplete — the eggs and sugar called for in the method never got their quantities into the column. Read this as a cake-doughnut framework rather than a set of instructions to follow line by line.
- Missing quantitiesThe method calls for eggs and sugar that the printed list omits, and there is no salt. Comparable cake-doughnut recipes of the period use about 2 eggs and 1 cup sugar to 1 cup milk and 4½ cups flour, with ½ teaspoon salt, but that is inference, not what the book says.
- Soda and cream of tartarThis is homemade baking powder: 1 teaspoon soda with 2 teaspoons cream of tartar, the standard 1:2 proportion, giving lift comparable to a few teaspoons of modern baking powder. Sift them thoroughly with the flour or you get bitter yellow streaks.
- "Roll to one inch thickness"Almost certainly a misprint or a very generous reading — an inch of raw cake dough will brown outside before the centre sets. Period recipes generally roll cake doughnuts somewhere between about ¼ and ½ inch.
- Fat temperature"Hot fat" means 365–375F. Below that the rings drink grease; above it the crust colours before the crumb cooks. Fry in two or three batches so the temperature does not crash.
- What the fat wasProbably lard, possibly lard mixed with beef suet, in a deep kettle; the book does not say. Any neutral high-smoke-point fat works, though the flavour of the original likely leaned on animal fat.
- The overnight chillNot optional in practice. A cold, rested dough handles with less flour on the board, and less flour means a lighter doughnut.
- DrainingBrown paper was the grocer's bag. Use a rack over a sheet pan; paper towels trap steam against the underside and soften the crust.
- YieldAbout 2 dozen doughnuts plus holes from this quantity of flour. They stale fast — these are meant to be eaten the day they are fried.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate maker, and like many manufacturer cookbooks of the era it surrounded its branded chocolate recipes with a full domestic repertoire. The ring doughnut is generally traced to Dutch olykoek ("oily cake") carried to New York, the hole usually explained as a fix for the raw centre that plagued a solid ball of dough. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar leavening here is a holdover from before packaged baking powder became universal: cooks could buy the two components separately and mix their own, and some went on doing so after tins of Royal and Rumford were widely available.