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Flour (Scald and cool milk when)
Scald and cool milk; when lukewarm, add the yeast cake dis-- solved in water, salt, and flour enough to make a stiff batter; let rise over night. In morning add shortening melted, sugar, eggs well beaten, nutmeg, and enough flour to make a stiff dough; let rise again, and if too soft to handle, add more flour. Toss on floured board, pat, and roll to threefourths inch thickness. Shape with cutter, and work between hands until round. Place on floured board, let rise one hour, turn, and let rise again; fry in deep fat, and drain on brown paper. Cool, and roll in powdered sugar. 1 cup sugar 2½ tablespoons butter 3 eggs 1 cup milk Doughnuts I 4 teaspoons baking powder ¼ teaspoon cinnamon ¼ teaspoon grated nutmeg 1½ teaspoons salt Flour to roll Cream the butter, and add one-half sugar. Beat egg until light, add remaining sugar, and combine mixtures. Add three and one-haif cups flour, mixed and sifted with baking powder, salt, and spices; then enough more flour to make dough stiff enough to roll. Toss one-third of mixture on floured board, knead slightly, pat, and roll out to one-fourth inch thickness. Shape with a doughnut cutter, fry in deep fat, take up on a skewer, and drain on brown paper. Add trimmings to one-half remaining mixture, roll, shape, and fry as before; repeat. Doughnuts should come quickly to top of fat, brown on one side, then be turned to brown on the other; avoid turning more than once. The fat must be kept at a uniform temperature. If too cold, doughnuts will absorb fat; if too hot, doughnuts will brown before sufficiently risen. See rule for testing fat. 4 cups flour 1½ teaspoons salt 1¾ teaspoons soda
Two doughnut methods sit side by side here: an overnight yeast-raised dough and the quicker baking-powder "Doughnuts I." Both hinge entirely on fat temperature.
- Fat temperatureThe "rule for testing fat" referred to is a bread-cube test: a cube of stale bread is browned in the fat and timed, the book giving different times for cooked and uncooked mixtures. Use a thermometer in the region of 360-375F and keep it there; the dough drops the temperature every time you add a batch, so fry in small loads.
- Why one turn onlyEach turn breaks the crust that is sealing the surface, and a broken crust lets fat in. Let the doughnut rise, colour on one side, turn once, and lift it out.
- Frying fatThe original would most likely have used lard or a beef-fat frying compound. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works; peanut, canola or refined sunflower are all stable at frying temperature.
- Brown paperGrocers' brown paper was the standard draining surface. A wire rack set over a sheet pan drains better and keeps the underside from steaming; paper towels are fine as a second choice.
- Ambiguous quantitiesSeveral of the measures in these lists are garbled in the printed text. For the baking-powder doughnuts, read the butter as roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons and the cinnamon and nutmeg as 1/4 teaspoon each; the salt is given as 1 1/2 teaspoons. Adjust to taste rather than trusting the garbled figures literally.
- Flour by feel"Flour to roll" means the dough is finished by handling, not by measure. Start with the three and a half cups stated and add only enough more to stop it sticking; excess flour is the usual cause of dry, bready doughnuts.
- Working in thirdsRolling one-third at a time keeps the rest cool and unhandled. Chill the reserved dough while the first batch fries, and rest the re-rolled trimmings a few minutes so they do not shrink in the fat.
- The raised doughFor the yeast version, a yeast cake is usually equated with about 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry yeast, though period cakes varied in size. The double rise after cutting helps give a light interior; a warm room and about an hour each time is right, and the shaped rings should look visibly puffed before frying.
- YieldThe baking-powder recipe makes roughly two to three dozen doughnuts plus holes, depending on cutter size. Sugar the yeast-raised ones only after they are fully cool, or the coating dissolves.
Fried sweetened dough came to American kitchens largely through the Dutch olykoek ("oil cake"), a ball of raised dough dropped into hot fat, and the hole is generally traced to nineteenth-century New England rather than to any single documented inventor. What this page shows is a technology in transition: the first recipe is the older method, a sponge set overnight with a yeast cake, while "Doughnuts I" leans on chemical leavening, which by the end of the nineteenth century had made doughnuts an hour's work instead of a day's. The instructions dwell less on the dough than on the behaviour of the fat and the injunction against turning twice.