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Sour-Milk Doughnuts
1 cup sugar
½ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sour cream
½ teaspoon cinnamon
2 eggs
1 cup sour milk
Flour
½ teaspoon nutmeg
½ teaspoon soda
Mix the sugar with the cream and add the beaten eggs and sour milk.
Sift the soda, salt and spices with one cup of flour and add to the first mixture. Add additional flour to make a dough just stiff enough to handle. Toss on a floured board, roll out, and cut.
Fry in deep fat. Test temperature of fat as in sweetmilk sugar. doughnuts. Drain on unglazed paper. When cold, roll in powdered
A plain soda-raised doughnut of the kind that assumed a crock of naturally soured milk in the pantry. The text is cut off at the end; it finishes "roll in powdered sugar."
- Sour milkThis means clabbered raw milk, mildly acidic and thickened. Pasteurized milk left out spoils rather than sours, so use buttermilk, or stir 1 tablespoon lemon juice or white vinegar into 1 cup whole milk and let it stand 10 minutes.
- Flour quantityUnstated by design. Expect roughly 3 to 3½ cups total, including the first cup sifted with the leavening. Stop as soon as the dough can be handled — the softer it is, the lighter the doughnut, and extra flour makes them heavy and dry.
- SodaHalf a teaspoon of soda per cup of sour milk is on the low side by modern standards; 3/4 to 1 teaspoon is more usual for this much acid and gives a better rise. Sift it thoroughly with the flour so no bitter streaks remain.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe defers to the "sweetmilk sugar doughnuts" instructions for testing the fat; that recipe is not on this page, though tests of the period usually timed how fast a cube of bread browned. For modern frying, 365–370°F. Below that the dough drinks fat; above it, the outside colors before the center sets.
- Fat and depthLard was the usual frying fat of the period, with beef suet also used; the recipe itself says only "deep fat." Any neutral high-smoke-point oil works. Allow at least 3 inches depth so the doughnuts float and turn, and fry in small batches to keep the temperature from crashing.
- Chill the doughNot in the original, but 30 minutes in the refrigerator makes this slack dough far easier to roll and cut, and helps the doughnuts hold shape in the fat. Roll about 3/8 inch thick.
- Unglazed paperButcher's or brown paper, used because it absorbs. Paper towels on a rack do the same job; a rack alone is better still for keeping the underside crisp.
- SugaringFollow the instruction to wait until cold. Powdered sugar on a warm doughnut dissolves into a damp film.
- YieldRoughly 18 to 24 doughnuts with a 2½-inch cutter, plus the holes, which fry more quickly.
Sour-milk baking is the older of the two doughnut traditions in American cookbooks: before reliable commercial baking powder, soda plus an acid — sour milk, buttermilk, molasses — was how a cook got lift, and the sour crock was a byproduct of keeping raw milk rather than something bought on purpose. Recipe collections of this era routinely print sweet-milk and sour-milk versions of the same cake side by side, and the cross-reference here suggests this book does the same, so the cook could use whatever the dairy had produced. The fried sweet dough itself is generally traced to the Dutch olykoek, "oil cake," carried into American kitchens through New York.