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Some Krullers
The cakes at tea ate short and crisp.--Goldsmith.
Cruller, Kruller. Old English, crull, curled; crule to curl. German, krulle, something curled.
A curled or crisped cake boiled in fat--Webster.
The bakers for doughnuts, but women should make the crullers every time. Too heavy a hand with the sugar and, worse still, with the baking powder will make them a burning disgrace, a greasy stain upon hotel cookery. Besides, only women know how or have patience to curl crisp crullers into wonderful knots, twirls, twists and ringlets.
The primitive form of cruller is plain beaten biscuit dough, rolled extremely thin and cut into ribbons, then fried. A handful of sugar added to the dough makes a better kind, and many are the people in the domestic world who would not give them in exchange for any more cake-like varieties. For hotel supper tables, to change with doughnuts, the following are the best. Crullers. Best and Quickest. 2 pounds of flour. 3 or 4 teaspoonfuls of baking powder. Large half pint of milk. 4 ounces of butter. 6 ounces of sugar. 4 eggs. Salt. Nutmeg flavor. Mix the powder in the flour. Dissolve the sugar in the milk, add the eggs, and the butter melted, salt and flavor. Pour this fluid mixture into the middle of the flour and mix up like biscuit. Cut out and fry right away. A quick way to shape them is to cut in rings with a double cutter, having a small cutter in the middle, and another way is to cut the thin rolled sheet in bands with a paste jagger, and divide that into pieces like three fingers attached at one end--or like a fork head. Sugar over when done.
These crullers take twice as much time to fry as doughnuts.
A hotel-scale batch, written for a baker who worked by the pound and judged fat by eye. The quantities scale down cleanly, and the only real technique question is frying temperature, which the original never states.
- Scale and yieldTwo pounds of flour is roughly 7 cups. The original gives no yield, and the count will vary widely with how you cut them. For a home kitchen, halve or quarter everything.
- The measures4 ounces butter is one stick; 6 ounces sugar is a scant cup. A "large half pint" of milk means a generous cup. Salt is unspecified, as it usually is in this book: about 2 teaspoons for the full quantity.
- Fat temperatureThe hinge of the whole thing, and the one number Whitehead omits. Fry at 365-375F. Below that the dough drinks fat and you get the "greasy stain" he warns about; above it the outside colors before the interior sets.
- Frying timeThe original says these "take twice as much time to fry as doughnuts." At a modern kettle temperature and rolled thin, they are likely to be done sooner -- roughly a minute a side -- so watch them rather than timing them against the original.
- Mixing like biscuitWith the butter already melted this is not a rubbed-in biscuit dough; it means mix fast, mix little, and stop as soon as it comes together. Overworking gives tough, bready crullers.
- Rolling and cuttingA paste jagger is a fluted pastry wheel. The "double cutter" is a standard doughnut cutter with a center hole. The fork-head shape is a rectangle slit into three fingers joined at one end; the text's talk of knots, twirls and twists suggests these were then worked into shape by hand.
- Chill first if you canThe dough is soft and warm from the melted butter. Twenty minutes in the refrigerator makes it roll thin without tearing, which matters here since thinness is what makes crullers crisp rather than cakey.
- Baking powderTake his warning seriously; he says too heavy a hand with it will ruin them. Modern double-acting powder is more reliable than what he had, so start at the 3 teaspoons rather than the 4.
- Finishing"Sugar over when done" means dusting with granulated or fine sugar while the crullers are still hot enough for it to cling. Drain on a rack, not on paper, or the undersides steam.
Webster's etymology, which Whitehead quotes at length, is very nearly right: the word comes to American English from the Dutch krullen, to curl, and the twisted fried cake traveled with Dutch settlement in New York and the Hudson valley before spreading through the whole American repertoire of fried dough. What makes the passage worth reading is the shop-floor politics underneath it: The American Pastry Cook was written by Jessup Whitehead for professional hotel bakers, and here he concedes a whole category of work to the women of the house on the grounds that curling and twisting takes patience the bake shop will not spend. It is a period attitude rather than a culinary fact, but it does record something true about the trade -- doughnuts could be cut by machine and dropped by the hundred, while a properly knotted cruller had to be shaped one at a time by hand.