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Crullers
4 eggs. 2-3 cup butter. A little salt. 1/4 cup sweet milk. 2 teaspoons baking powder sifted in 2 cups flour.
Make dough stiff enough to roll. Cut and bake.
A bare-bones formula of the kind common in early twentieth-century community-style collections, where the writer assumed the cook already knew what a cruller looked like and how it was cooked. Two things need settling before you start: the fat quantity and the cooking method.
- The butter measureThe printed "2-3 cup butter" is almost certainly two-thirds of a cup, about 5 oz or 150 g. Two to three cups of butter against two cups of flour would not produce a dough that rolls at all.
- Sugar is missingNo sugar appears in the ingredient list, though many cruller recipes of the period include some. As written the result is a plain fried biscuit; sugar creamed with the butter is the usual route if you want it sweet.
- "Bake" almost certainly means fry"Bake" probably means fry -- Crullers are usually a fried dough, dropped into deep fat at 365-375F and turned once, two to three minutes in all. The stiff rolled-and-cut dough here is the classic fried type, though the recipe as printed says bake and specifies no temperature.
- Sweet milkThis means ordinary fresh milk, named to distinguish it from soured or buttermilk, which would have called for soda instead of baking powder. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- Handling the doughRoll to about a third of an inch and cut into strips or rings; thicker than that and the centre stays raw while the outside colours. Chilling the dough half an hour makes it far easier to cut cleanly.
- YieldTwo cups of flour gives roughly eighteen to twenty-four crullers depending on the cutter. They are best within a few hours of frying, dusted with sugar while still warm.
Crullers came into American kitchens through the Dutch of New York and New Jersey, the name generally traced to Dutch krul, a curl or twist, describing the shape the dough was given before it hit the fat. Through the nineteenth century they were a standing item of the household frying kettle alongside doughnuts and fritters, and the spread of commercial baking powder in the second half of that century replaced the older leavening of eggs alone or pearlash, which is why a recipe as terse as this one can simply say two teaspoons sifted into the flour. The compression here, no sugar named, no method beyond three words, is typical of a formula copied down for someone who had watched it made.