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Crullers
¼ cup butter or shortening
3½ teaspoons baking-powder
1 cup sugar
¼ teaspoon grated nutmeg
2 eggs
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
Flour
Cream the butter or shortening. Add sugar; then the well-beaten eggs . Sift the baking-powder, nutmeg, and salt with one cup of flour and add alternately with the milk to the first mixture. Add additional flour to make a dough stiff enough to handle. Toss on Twist floured board, roll one-half inch thick and cut into strips. -milk and fry in deep fat. Test temperature of fat as in sweet doughnuts. Drain on unglazed paper and when cold roll in . powdered sugar. This recipe makes about three dozen crullers
A plain baking-powder cruller dough, cut in strips and twisted before frying. The recipe leaves the flour open-ended, which is normal for the period but means the cook has to judge the dough.
- How much flourThe one cup sifted with the leavening is only the start; expect to work in roughly 2 to 2½ cups more, for a total of about 3 to 3½ cups. Stop as soon as the dough can be rolled without sticking badly, since extra flour makes the crullers heavy and dry.
- Fat temperatureThe original defers to the sweet doughnut recipe elsewhere in the book, which is not reproduced here; period doughnut recipes generally judged the fat with a bread-cube test, a cube of stale bread browning in roughly a minute. That corresponds to somewhere around 365-375F. Cooler than that and the crullers soak fat; much hotter and they colour before the centre sets.
- Thickness mattersHalf an inch is thicker than it sounds for fried dough. Keep to it and keep the strips narrow, about three-quarters of an inch wide, or the interior will still be raw when the outside is dark.
- TwistingCut the rolled sheet into strips, then twist each one two or three turns and pinch the ends before it goes into the fat. A twist that is not pinched will unwind as the dough expands.
- Unglazed paperThis means brown paper or newsprint, used because it absorbs fat. Paper towel over a rack does the same job; a rack alone is better still, as sitting flat on paper steams the underside.
- Baking-powder quantityThree and a half teaspoons reads high, but against a dough of roughly three cups of flour it works out at about a teaspoon per cup, which is ordinary. Use a modern double-acting powder and measure level.
- SugaringThe instruction to wait until cold is deliberate. Powdered sugar dusted on hot crullers dissolves into a damp glaze; cooled crullers hold a dry coat.
- YieldAbout three dozen, as stated. They are best the day they are made and stale quickly.
The name is generally traced to Dutch krul (plural krullen), a curl, and the shape has always been the point: a strip of dough twisted or curled before it hits the fat, as distinct from the ring doughnut. Crullers travelled with Dutch settlement in New York and the Hudson valley and were long a domestic staple rather than a bakery item, since deep-frying a batch of sweet dough was one of the quickest ways to produce a large quantity of cake without an oven. This version belongs to the chemically leavened branch of the family rather than the older yeast-raised one, which is what marks it as a product of its era: by the time Butterick was issuing household books alongside its dress patterns, reliable commercial baking powder was available.