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Carnival Cakes
Beat into a gill of milk a couple of eggs, adding gradually half a pound of flour. Let it stand for three hours, and then work into it enough flour to make a good dough; roll out thin and cut into rounds nine inches in diameter, then cut four parallel lines to within one inch of the sides so as to form handles by which the cake may be lifted. Place in hot fat and fry to a light yellow; pile on a dish and sprinkle sugar over them. The cakes should be eaten cold.
A plain fried dough of the Carnival type — no sugar, no leavening, and no salt in the dough itself, all of which is deliberate. The points below cover the measurements and the two steps that decide whether these come out crisp or leathery.
- The hinge: roll it genuinely thinWith no leavening, lift comes entirely from steam and from how thin the dough is. The recipe says only "roll out thin"; aim for something on the order of 1/16 inch, or the cakes fry up tough rather than blistered and brittle.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. With two eggs and half a pound of flour (about 1 3/4 cups), the initial mixture is a thick batter, not a dough; the extra flour comes later.
- "Enough flour to make a good dough"Expect to add roughly another 1 to 1 1/2 cups, worked in until the dough is firm and no longer tacky. It should feel stiffer than bread dough, closer to fresh pasta.
- The three-hour restThis is hydration and gluten relaxation, not fermentation — there is no yeast. Skipping it leaves dough that springs back and will not roll thin. Cover it so the surface does not skin over, and refrigerate if the kitchen is warm.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe says only "hot fat"; in modern terms that is somewhere around 360–375F. Below that the cakes drink oil and go greasy; much above and they brown before the interior dries. Fry only as far as the light yellow the recipe specifies, which at this thinness happens quickly.
- Nine-inch roundsThese need a wide pan — a 12-inch skillet with an inch of fat, or a large wok — and both hands with the slashed "handles." Smaller rounds of four or five inches are far easier to manage, though that is a departure from the nine inches and four slashes the recipe specifies.
- The slashesThe recipe explains them as handles; the cuts would also let steam escape and help keep the sheet from ballooning into a single pillow, so the cake stays flatter.
- Sugar and servingSprinkle while still warm so it clings; the recipe specifies only "sugar." Oscar's instruction to eat them cold gives the fat time to set, which helps them stay crisp. Half a pound of flour plus the working-in flour yields roughly eight or ten large cakes.
Carnival cakes belong to the great European family of pre-Lenten fried doughs — Swiss and southern German Fasnachtsküchli, Italian chiacchiere and frappe, Lyonnais bugnes — all made in the days before Ash Wednesday to use up the eggs and fat that Lent would put off the table. The near-total absence of sugar in the dough is period-correct: sweetness was applied at the end, dusted over the finished pile. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, compiled this 1896 book.