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Doughnuts II
1¾ teaspoons cream of tartar ¼ teaspoon grated nutmeg ¼ teaspoon cinnamon ½ tablespoon butter 1 cup sugar 1 cup sour milk 1 egg Put flour in shallow pan; add salt, soda, cream of tartar, and spices. Work in butter with tips of fingers; add sugar, egg well beaten, and sour milk. Stir thoroughly, and toss on board thickly dredged with flour; knead slightly, using more flour if necessary. Pat and roll out to one-fourth inch thickness; shape, fry, and drain. Sour-milk doughnuts may be turned as soon as they come to top of fat, and frequently afterwards. 2 cups sugar 4 eggs 1½ cups sour milk
The text as printed has been mangled in transcription: the flour and soda quantities are missing, the fractions have lost their slashes, and a stray line of figures trails off the end. What survives is a standard sour-milk doughnut, and the method is complete enough to follow if you supply the gaps from the pattern of the period.
- The broken numbers"134 teaspoons cream of tartar" is 1¾ teaspoons; "14 teaspoon" of nutmeg and cinnamon is ¼ teaspoon each. The flour, salt and soda quantities have dropped out entirely. A Farmer-era sour-milk doughnut of this size runs to about 4 cups flour, ½ teaspoon salt and ½ teaspoon soda; treat that as a reconstruction, not the original text.
- The trailing line"2 cups sugar 4 eggs 1½ cups sour milk" at the end belongs to a different recipe or to a doubled version that lost its heading. Ignore it when working from the instructions above.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured milk, which is not something you can pick up in an ordinary supermarket. Use cultured buttermilk cup for cup, or stir 1 tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar into a cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes. Pasteurised milk left on the counter will not reliably sour in the same way.
- Soda and cream of tartarTogether with the acid milk these are doing the whole job of leavening; there is no yeast and no baking powder. Mix the wet into the dry, roll and cut without delay, since the gas begins escaping the moment the acid meets the soda.
- Fat and temperatureThe recipe specifies only 'fat', fried deep enough for the doughnuts to rise to the top; lard would have been the usual choice. Any neutral oil at 365-370F works. Below that the dough drinks fat and turns heavy; above it the outside colours before the centre sets.
- Why the frequent turningThe instruction to turn sour-milk doughnuts as soon as they surface, and often after, is the one line that matters. Constant turning keeps the crust setting evenly and stops the classic cracked, one-sided doughnut with a raw seam.
- Dough handling'Knead slightly' is meant literally, though the recipe does allow more flour on the board and in the dough if necessary. This is a soft, sticky dough closer to biscuit than bread, and a lot of extra flour worked in tends to give tough, bready doughnuts; chilling it briefly is the alternative if it fights you.
- YieldOn the reconstructed flour quantity, roughly two and a half to three dozen doughnuts and holes at ¼-inch thickness, depending on cutter size. They are best within a few hours of frying.
Sour-milk doughnuts belong to the era before commercial baking powder settled into every kitchen cupboard, when a household with a milk pan had a free leavening acid on hand and combined it with soda to raise quick breads, cakes and fried cakes alike. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, published in 1896, sits right at the hinge: it gives both a sweet-milk doughnut raised with baking powder and this sour-milk version raised with soda and cream of tartar. The distinction was practical rather than nostalgic. Sour-milk doughs are softer and slacker, and Farmer breaks her usual brevity to tell the cook to turn them the instant they rise and to keep turning them.