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Flour (Teaspoons soda teaspoons salt)
1 1/3 cups sour milk 2 cups sugar 4 eggs 4 tablespoons melted butter 2 teaspoons soda 2 teaspoons salt 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon grated nutmeg Mix ingredients in order given; shape, fry, and drain.
This entry has come apart in transcription: the ingredient list has been split and reversed, and both the flour quantity and the liquid have dropped out entirely. What survives is unmistakably a Boston Cooking School doughnut, and it can be read sensibly if you know what the missing pieces would have been.
- Read the list in the right orderThe two blocks appear to have been transposed in transcription. The likeliest original order is butter and sugar, then the eggs (yolks and whites are listed separately, which usually means the whites were beaten and added last), with the dry ingredients -- flour, soda, salt, baking powder, nutmeg -- worked in. The direction "Mix ingredients in order given" cannot refer to the order as printed here.
- Missing quantitiesNo flour weight and no liquid are given. A Fannie Farmer doughnut of this size normally takes about a cup of sour milk or buttermilk and roughly 4 cups of flour, but that is inference from comparable recipes in the same chapter, not from this page. Treat the fragment as incomplete rather than guessing precisely.
- Soda and baking powder togetherTwo teaspoons of soda alongside baking powder suggests the missing liquid carried some acid, most likely sour milk or buttermilk, since soda needs acid to react cleanly and avoid a soapy, yellowish crumb.
- SaltTwo teaspoons of salt is high by modern taste for a batch of this size, though the state of the transcription means the figure cannot be fully relied on. One teaspoon of table salt is closer to what a present-day cook expects.
- ShapeThe recipe says only "shape"; comparable doughnut recipes direct rolling the dough out and cutting it with a floured doughnut cutter.
- Drain"drain" here means draining on brown paper, as the book directs elsewhere. A wire rack set over a tray is better, since paper traps steam under the doughnut and softens the crust.
- YieldAssuming the missing flour and liquid, a batch built on a cup of sugar and two eggs would make something in the region of two to three dozen doughnuts, depending on cutter size. They are best within a few hours of frying.
Fannie Farmer's contribution is often described as less invention than measurement, insisting on the level teaspoon and the level cup so that a soda quantity like the one here would behave the same in every kitchen. Nutmeg is a very common doughnut spice in nineteenth-century American cookbooks, and it is grated fresh in these books from whole nutmeg. The state of this particular page, with its columns collided and its flour missing, is a reminder that these texts reach us through scanning and transcription as much as through print.