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Doughnuts
1 egg, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup milk (sweet), 1/2 tsp. salt, 2 tsp. Royal baking powder, 2 tbsp. shortening (crisco melted), 1 tsp. vanilla, pastry flour for mixing.
— Mrs. Addie Sanborn
A bare ingredient list of the kind contributed cookbooks ran on — the assumption being that any reader already knew what to do with doughnut dough. The frying is left entirely unstated, so that is where most of the work lies.
- Flour quantity"Pastry flour for mixing" is genuinely open-ended; the original gives no amount. Expect somewhere around 3 to 3 1/2 cups to reach a soft dough that can be rolled about 1/3 inch thick, and add it gradually — a stiff, over-floured cake doughnut fries dry and heavy.
- Pastry flourLower in protein than all-purpose, which keeps the crumb tender. If you only have all-purpose, substitute cup for cup and hold back a couple of tablespoons, or replace 2 tablespoons per cup with cornstarch.
- Frying, which the recipe omitsThese are cake doughnuts, cut and fried in deep fat at 365-375F. Below that they soak up grease; much above it and the outside colors before the center sets. Two rings at a time in a 3-quart pot, roughly 1 1/2 minutes a side.
- ShorteningCrisco is still on shelves, though reformulated to remove partially hydrogenated oil. Melted butter or a neutral oil works in the batter; for the frying fat use a high-smoke-point oil rather than trying to match period lard.
- Royal baking powderIn this period Royal was sold as a cream-of-tartar powder, fast-acting rather than double-acting; 2 teaspoons of a modern double-acting powder will stand in measure for measure. Roll and cut promptly rather than letting the dough sit — with a fast-acting powder much of the lift is spent on contact with the liquid.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk and soda that other recipes of the period used instead. Whole milk is the closest match.
- Chilling the doughNot mentioned, but half an hour in the refrigerator makes a soft dough of this kind far easier to roll and cut, and helps the rings hold their shape in the fat.
- YieldAbout 18 to 20 doughnuts of 2 1/2 inches, plus holes. Drain on a rack, not paper, and sugar them while still warm if you want the sugar to cling.
Church and lodge cookbooks like this one — the Philathea class was part of the Baraca-Philathea movement, Baptist in origin but run as an interdenominational women's Bible study movement, which spread widely through the United States and Canada in the early twentieth century — were compiled as fundraisers, each recipe signed by the woman who gave it. That format explains the shorthand: contributors wrote down what distinguished their version, not the parts every cook already knew, which is why the frying instructions are missing entirely. The specific naming of Royal baking powder and Crisco dates the entry usefully. Chemically leavened cake doughnuts had the practical advantage that they could be mixed and fried in a single sitting, and Crisco, introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, was promoted hard through exactly this kind of recipe pamphlet and community collection as a cleaner, cheaper stand-in for lard and butter.