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Corn Meal Doughnuts
A tea-cup and a half boiling milk poured over two tea-cups meal; when cool add two cups flour, one of butter, one and one-half of sugar, three eggs; flavor with nutmeg or cinnamon; let rise till very light; roll about half an inch thick, cut in diamond shape, and boil in hot lard.
A scalded-cornmeal doughnut from a book that assumes you keep a yeast jar going and a kettle of lard on the stove. Two things in the text need resolving before you start: there is no leavening listed, and the butter quantity is very high.
- The missing leavening"Let rise till very light" implies a raising agent, and none is listed; yeast is the likeliest omission in a dough set to rise. If you take it that way, figure on about 2 teaspoons instant yeast or a cake of compressed yeast, stirred into the cornmeal mush once it has cooled to lukewarm, not while it is hot.
- Scalding the mealPouring boiling milk over the cornmeal is the hinge of the recipe. It gelatinizes the starch and softens the grit, which is why these fry tender rather than sandy. Let it sit until it is genuinely cool, or the eggs will curdle and the yeast will die.
- "One of butter"Read in sequence this means one tea-cup of butter — roughly 6 oz on the 6 fl oz reckoning used below — against two cups of flour, which is far richer than any modern doughnut dough and will be difficult to roll. You may prefer to treat it as a half cup and judge the dough by feel; the original measure sits oddly with the rest of the proportions.
- Tea-cupsA nineteenth-century tea-cup is generally smaller than a modern measuring cup; period sources vary, from about 4 fl oz up to 8, with 6 fl oz a common working figure. Scaling everything by the same cup keeps the ratios intact whichever vessel you choose.
- Rising timeA dough this rich and this heavy with cornmeal is slow. Expect 1½ to 2½ hours at room temperature for a visible, slack, puffy rise; refrigerating it for the last half hour makes it much easier to roll and cut.
- "Boil in hot lard"Boiling here means deep frying. Hold the fat at 360–370F; below that the dough drinks grease, above it the cornmeal exterior colors before the center sets. Two to three minutes total, turning once, for half-inch diamonds.
- FatLard is the period choice and the best one for flavour, but any neutral fat with a smoke point of 400F or above works. You need at least 2 inches depth so the pieces float.
- YieldRoughly two to three dozen diamonds, depending on how large you cut them. They are best within a few hours of frying.
Cornmeal doughnuts belong to the long American habit of stretching wheat flour with the cheaper native grain — a practice that ran from colonial hasty pudding through Civil War–era shortages and well into the commercial-flour age simply because people had come to like the taste and texture. Scalding the meal first was standard technique for anything from spoonbread to Anadama loaves; it is what makes coarse meal behave in a dough. That this recipe is raised with yeast rather than baking powder places it in the older tradition of the "raised doughnut," which predates chemically leavened cake doughnuts and was still common in home kitchens well into the nineteenth century. The diamond cut, rather than a ring, is often said to be the older shape, and it is sometimes explained as a matter of thrift: cut with a knife, it wastes no dough and needs no cutter.