German Puffs
1 pound of light bread dough. 6 ounces of butter. 2 ounces of sugar. 1/2 cup of milk. 10 yolks of eggs. 1 1/4 pounds of flour. Little salt. These can only be made the soft, light yellow puff-balls they ought to be, by a strict and thorough method of working the ingredients together. Take the dough 6 hours before the meal and mix in the butter, sugar, milk and salt. Set in a warm place awhile, then thoroughly beat together. Add two yolks at a time and flour by littles alternately, beating against the side of the pan. Then turn out the dough and knead it on the table. Set away to rise about 3 hours. Knead the dough twice more, as directed for rolls, but more thoroughly, till air will snap from the edges when pinched. Mould out in little balls. Brush these over with melted lard to prevent hardening outside. Rise half an hour or more on greased pans. Fry in sweet lard. May be sugared over or served with sauce, or as doughnuts, cold. They soak grease if raised too much. "Little Pittsburgh" Doughnuts.
These are doughnuts with a little history attached--but let us make them first. 4 pounds of light bread dough. 8 ounces of sugar and syrup mixed. 2 eggs. 2 or 3 ounces of lard, melted. Powdered sugar to dredge over. Lard to fry. Take the dough from the breakfast rolls, say at 9 in the morning, in Winter. In Summer the dough worked up at mid-day will do. Mix in the ingredients, let stand half an hour. Work up stiff with flour sufficient, and set to rise about 4 hours. Then knead, and roll it out to a sheet. Brush over the whole sheet of dough with very little melted lard. Cut out with a two-pound tomato can, and cut out the middle of each with a little empty two ounce ground cinnamon can. This makes rings, which must be set to rise on greased pans about 1/2 hour, then dropped in hot lard. Sift sugar over when done. They cook in about 5 minutes.
When Leadville first began grinding in crowds of mining men poor, and grinding them out rich, the poor men as they went in were often hard put to it for something to eat, and they never laughed at a doughnut, but treated it with respect. As saloons, boarding houses, clothing stores, stables, theatres, and even saw-mills and wood yards hastened to call themselves the "Little Pittsburgh," for the very famous mine which was at first the life of the camp, the bakers did likewise, and the makers of the preceding excellent doughnuts finding them a sort of bonanza as yet undeveloped, hastened to call them Little Pittsburghs, too. Purs?ing this vein they went on and advertised extensively. You could get a Little Pittsburgh doughnut for ten cents at any hour of the day or night, and a glass of dried-apple cider for the same price; but in a commutation arrangement you could get a doughnut and a glass of the cider together for fifteen cents. So Little Pittsburgh doughnuts became a part, and indeed, a leading feature of the camp. They were in two-line local notices scattered all through the papers, so that nobody could miss them. It seemed, in fact, as if all the news was gathered for the express purpose of drawing attention to doughnuts. One day it would be: "Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars has been offered and refused for the Chrysolite mine." And as a sequel: "There's nothing in camp can equal those Little Pittsburgh doughnuts." Or, perhaps: "Our esteemed fellow citizen fell down a shaft 500 feet deep, last evening. He struck on his head and probably never knew what hurt him." "O! those Little Pittsburgh doughnuts are so very fine, if you try them once you'll buy them every time, at the Union Bakery."
So, although the doughnuts were always the same, there was always something fresh and pleasant to give them a new zest. Sometimes it would be only a hanging, or a midnight garroting, but the chorus of doughnuts kept right on at the end of every performance, great or small. As a consequence these doughnuts had a great run. It is hard to fathom motives. Perhaps some people ate them for spice, trying to abolish them and their "damnable iteration," but of course that was useless, there were plenty more where these came from. They were placed in a tentative way on the best hotel tables, and they took--or at least the people took and partook. Evidently these Little Pittsburghs were popular with all.
But the halcyon days of ten-cent doughnuts were short and few, for soon competition came and began cutting them out with three-pound tomato cans instead of two-pound, making them so much larger. Not satisfied with that, other competitors left out the eggs and half the sugar and sold at five cents. There was no margin to pay for advertising in that. Little Pittsburgh doughnuts weakened and come down and the advertising c?ased. None may know what subtle connection there may be in the cases, but both the Leadville newspapers soon after died, and the Little Pittsburgh mine itself experienced a temporary collapse. I think it would have paid both the papers and the mining company to have gone on advertising the doughnuts at bed-rock prices, or even free, for when they left them out they left out the spice of the paper, and as the doughnuts had boosted Little Pittsburgh it would only have heen fair for Little Pittsburgh to boost-but it is useless moralizing. The next are the cheap, light-colored and large doughnuts that knocked the bottom out of the rich, brown Little Pittsburghs.
Two yeast-raised fried doughs from a trade manual, written for a baker who already has bread dough on the bench. Both depend on the same judgment call: fully developed gluten, but only a short final proof.
- The hinge: proof short, not long"They soak grease if raised too much" is the whole trick. The recipe allows the moulded balls "half an hour or more" and the rings about half an hour; a piece taken too far is liable to collapse in the lard and drink it.
- "Light bread dough"Plain white yeast bread dough, already risen once — the author assumes you are stealing a pound off the morning roll batch. Any lean straight dough (flour, water, salt, yeast) at the end of bulk fermentation works. One pound is roughly the dough from 10 oz flour.
- Weigh everythingThe proportions only make sense by weight: 1 lb dough, 1 1/4 lb flour, 6 oz butter, 10 yolks. Scaling the puffs down by half is easy; scaling by volume is not.
- Adding the yolksTwo at a time, alternating with flour, beating against the side of the pan. Adding all ten yolks at once is likely to slacken the dough badly.
- "Till air will snap from the edges when pinched"The author's test for a fully developed, gassy dough: pinch a thin edge and the trapped bubbles pop. Roughly comparable to a modern windowpane test plus visible bubble structure through the skin.
- Sweet lard"Sweet" means fresh and unrancid, not sugared. Refined lard, shortening or a neutral high-smoke-point oil all fry these acceptably.
- Frying temperatureNo temperature is given; the fat was judged by eye. Around 360-370F suits these. The recipe gives about five minutes for the rings.
- The tin-can cuttersA two-pound tomato can of the period gives a ring roughly 3 1/2 inches across; the two-ounce ground cinnamon can cuts a considerably smaller hole. Standard doughnut cutters are close enough.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for working bakers and hotel cooks, and both formulas here are shop practice rather than home cooking: they begin with dough already on hand, which is why no yeast is listed. The "German puff" belongs to the broad family of yeast-raised fried dough that German bakers carried into American cities — Krapfen and Berliner worked with an egg-rich, butter-enriched bread dough. The doughnut story is anchored in real ground: the Little Pittsburg mine on Fryer Hill, one of the strikes that made Leadville, Colorado, a major silver camp around 1878-1880, and the Chrysolite, whose refused quarter-million-dollar offer Whitehead quotes as newspaper filler. The name attached itself to saloons, liveries and bakeries alike, and the collapse he describes — larger doughnuts cut with three-pound cans, then five-cent versions with the eggs and half the sugar left out — is a plain account of how a cheap competitor kills an enriched product. The "cheap, light-colored and large" doughnuts he promises next are the ones that won.