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Afternoon Tea Doughnuts
2 eggs 6 tablespoons sugar 3/4 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg 2 tablespoons shortening 6 tablespoons milk 2 cups flour 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder Beat eggs until very light; add sugar, salt, nutmeg and melted shortening; add milk, and flour and baking powder which have been sifted together; mix well. Drop by teaspoonfuls into deep hot fat and fry until brown. Drain well on unglazed paper and sprinkle lightly with powdered sugar. (Delicious with afternoon tea.)
A drop doughnut rather than a cut and rolled one — the batter is soft enough to fall from a spoon, which is why the mixture looks wetter than a doughnut dough should. Fat temperature is the hinge here.
- Fat temperature"Deep hot fat" means 365–375F. Below that the batter drinks oil and collapses; above it the outside colors before the crumb sets, leaving a raw center. Use a thermometer and let the fat recover between batches.
- Size and shapeTeaspoonfuls give balls about an inch across, roughly the size of a modern doughnut hole. Push the batter off with a second spoon; they will turn themselves once, and if they do not, nudge them so both sides brown.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to two cups of flour is a high but deliberate ratio — the lift has to happen fast in hot fat. Modern double-acting powder works, but do not let the batter stand; fry it as soon as it is mixed.
- ShorteningIn this period the word meant lard or a vegetable shortening such as Crisco. Melted butter works and tastes better, though the doughnuts brown a shade faster.
- Frying mediumThe recipe says only "deep hot fat"; the period default would have been lard or a beef-fat blend. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point does the job now; you need enough depth that the balls float free rather than sit on the bottom.
- Unglazed paperBrown butcher's paper or newsprint, both once standard for draining. Paper towels or a wire rack over a sheet pan are the modern equivalents; the rack keeps the undersides from steaming soft.
- SugaringDust with powdered sugar while the doughnuts are still warm so it clings, but not while they are wet with fat or it dissolves to a paste.
- YieldAbout two and a half to three dozen small doughnuts. They are best within an hour or two and do not keep well overnight.
This comes from one of the cookbooks published by the Royal Baking Powder Company, which spent decades distributing free and low-cost recipe booklets that named its own product in every ingredient list — an early and very effective form of brand cookery writing. Chemically leavened doughnuts like these were the newer style: the older American doughnut, descended from the Dutch olykoek, was raised with yeast and needed hours of proofing, while baking powder made a batch possible in the time it took the fat to heat. The scale is the point here — something small enough to eat neatly from a plate, alongside tea, without a knife or fork.