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Cream Doughnuts
Beat one cup each of sour cream and sugar and two eggs together, add level tea-spoon soda, a little salt, and flour enough to roll.-Mrs. Hattie Meade,
A bare-bones nineteenth-century formula that assumes the cook already knows how to fry a doughnut — the original never mentions fat at all. The points below fill in what Mrs. Meade took for granted.
- The missing stepNothing here tells you to fry. Roll the dough about 3/8 inch thick, cut with a doughnut cutter, and fry in deep fat at 365–375F, turning once, roughly 1 to 1 1/2 minutes a side until deep gold. Below 350F they soak up grease; above 385F the outside colors before the center sets.
- Sour cream, then and nowIn farm kitchens of this period this would have been cream left to clabber naturally — thick, tangy, and acidic enough to react with the soda. Commercial full-fat cultured sour cream is the closest substitute. Avoid light or non-fat versions, which are thinner and waterier.
- Soda, not powderThe single teaspoon of soda is the only leavening, and it depends entirely on the acid in the cream. If you swap in sweet cream or milk the doughnuts will be flat and soapy-tasting.
- "Flour enough to roll"Expect somewhere around 3 to 3 1/2 cups for this quantity of liquid. Stop at the point where the dough is still tacky and barely handleable — more flour makes a tough, bready doughnut. Chilling the dough an hour makes a soft dough far easier to cut.
- SeasoningNutmeg is a common doughnut spice in recipes of this period, though this one calls for none; a half teaspoon of grated nutmeg or a teaspoon of vanilla would not be out of place.
- Frying fatThe original cook would have used lard or beef drippings in a deep iron kettle. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works; you need at least 3 inches of depth so the doughnuts float and turn freely.
- YieldAbout 18 to 24 doughnuts plus holes, depending on cutter size. They stale quickly — these are best within a few hours of frying.
The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to the great wave of subscription and community cookbooks that spread after the Civil War, in which contributions were gathered from named local women — Mrs. Hattie Meade here — though it was itself a compiled and edited commercial volume. That may account for the telegraphic style, which reads as though addressed to cooks who shared the same equipment and assumptions rather than to strangers. Sour-cream doughnuts specifically belong to the dairy economy of the period, when a household churning its own butter had soured cream on hand constantly and needed uses for it. The pairing with saleratus or soda was the ordinary chemistry of the day, predating reliable commercial baking powder in many rural kitchens; the acid in the cream and the alkali in the soda did the lifting between them.