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Doughnuts
2 cups sugar. 2 eggs. 2 teaspoons baking powder. 1 cup milk. Flour enough to roll. Flavor with nutmeg and fry in hot fat. Use the small centers for balls. Crisco is the best fat for doughnuts.
A skeleton recipe of the kind written for cooks who already knew what doughnut dough should feel like. The gaps are in the flour, the frying temperature and the fat, and those are the three things that decide whether the result is light or greasy.
- Fat temperature is the hingeThe original says only "hot fat." Doughnuts want 365-375F; below that they drink oil and turn heavy, above about 385F they colour before the centre sets. Use a thermometer and let the fat recover between batches.
- "Flour enough to roll"With 1 cup milk and 2 eggs, expect roughly 4 to 4 1/2 cups of flour for a soft dough that just holds a rolled sheet about 1/3 inch thick. Add it gradually; the more flour beyond that point, the drier and more bread-like the doughnut.
- The sugar is highTwo cups of sugar to one cup of milk is a high proportion, and sugar browns fast in hot fat. If the outsides are darkening before the insides cook, the sugar, not the timing, is usually the cause.
- No fat in the doughThis is a lean cake-doughnut batter with no butter or shortening worked in. It fries acceptably but stales quickly; eat the same day.
- Nutmeg quantity"Flavor with nutmeg" in a batch this size means about 1 teaspoon freshly grated, or a little more. Pre-ground nutmeg is noticeably flatter and needs a heavier hand.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold and still perfectly usable here. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point does the same job.
- The centersCutting a ring leaves a small round of dough. Fry these alongside the rings as "balls" or holes; they cook in roughly half the time and are done when they roll over by themselves and brown evenly.
- YieldExpect about 2 1/2 to 3 dozen doughnuts plus the same number of centers. Drain on a rack rather than paper so the undersides do not steam.
Fried sweetened dough is old and widely distributed, but the American doughnut is generally traced to the Dutch olykoek or oil-cake carried to New Netherland, a ball of enriched dough dropped in fat; the ring shape, with its hole to help the middle cook through, is traditionally credited to a nineteenth-century New England sea captain, a story repeated everywhere and documented nowhere firmly. By the time Mary A. Wilson was writing in the years around 1920 the doughnut was ordinary domestic baking rather than a holiday treat, and her version has these features: no fat in the dough, chemical leavening instead of yeast, nutmeg as the spice, and a named brand of hydrogenated shortening. Crisco had been on the market since the previous decade and its makers were energetic promoters through cookbooks and columns; an otherwise terse recipe finds room for a sentence recommending it.