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SOUR MILK AND CREAM (Sift the flour soda salt)
Sift the flour, soda, salt, and cinnamon together; add the currants. Stir in the milk quickly. The dough should be stiff enough to roll out. Cut into narrow strips and fry in hot fat. These are good with coffee.
1 cup corn-meal½ teaspoonful soda (scant) cup flour
A quick soda dough, cut into strips and fried — a thrifty doughnut made without eggs or sugar. The printed ingredient list has come through the typesetting badly mangled, so read the method first and reconstruct the proportions from it.
- The short ingredient listThe ingredient list gives amounts only for the corn-meal, soda and flour; the salt, cinnamon, currants and sour milk called for in the method have no stated quantities. Season to taste and add just enough sour milk to make a dough stiff enough to roll, with currants to suit.
- Sour milk is the leavening partnerThe title tells you the liquid: naturally soured raw milk or cream, whose lactic acid reacts with the soda. Cultured buttermilk is the modern stand-in. Sweet milk with the soda will taste soapy and metallic, because there is no acid to neutralise it.
- Do not sour milk yourself the old wayPeriod cooks left raw milk in a warm kitchen until it clabbered. Pasteurised milk does not sour cleanly — it spoils. Buy buttermilk, or acidulate milk with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice per cup.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, small dark raisins, not the fresh red or black berries. A half cup for a batch of this size is ample.
- Work fast"Stir in the milk quickly" is the hinge. The soda begins reacting with the acid the moment the two meet, and a dough left standing while you tidy the board will fry flat and heavy. Mix, roll, cut and fry in one continuous run.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe specifies only "hot fat". For fried doughs of this kind a usual modern working temperature is around 365F: much cooler and the strips soak, much hotter and the outside colours before the centre sets. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- Cut and yieldRoll about a quarter-inch thick and cut narrow strips, roughly half an inch wide and three or four inches long. How many the batch makes depends entirely on how the missing quantities are reconstructed and how thin the dough is rolled; they are best eaten within the hour.
Fried strips of soda-raised dough turn up under a great many names in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookery — wonders, fried cakes — and many of them owe something to sour milk. Before refrigeration, milk that had turned was an inevitable daily by-product rather than a loss, and the whole family of soda-and-sour-milk batters was built to consume it: biscuits, griddle cakes, gingerbread, and quick fried doughs like this one. That is why the recipe belongs in a book of left-overs, even though nothing here is strictly a leftover in the modern sense. The cornmeal points to the same economy, stretching wheat flour with the cheaper grain, and the closing line — "good with coffee" — places these squarely at breakfast or at the mid-morning break.