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Crullers and Doughnuts (To cook these properly the fat)
To cook these properly the fat should be of the right heat. When hot enough it will cease to bubble and be perfectly still; try with a bit of the batter, and if the heat is right the dough will rise in a few seconds to the top and occasion a bubbling in the fat, the cake will swell, and the under side quickly become brown. Clarified drippings of roast meat are more wholesome to fry them in than lard. A good suet may be prepared as follows for those who are sensible enough not to like greasy doughnuts or who Hebraically oppose lard. Use only beef suet, which is quite as cheap, cleanly, and healthy. Buy from the meat markets, speaking before hand, and securing nice, whole, clean leaves, which cut up in small pieces, put into a dinner-pot, which will hold well about ten pounds. Put in a pint of water, and after the first hour stir frequently; it takes about three hours with a good heat to render it. Drain through a coarse towel, and if the suet is good it will require but little squeezing, and leave but little scrap or cracklings. Put to cool in pans or jars, and you have an element into which, when well heated, you can drop the twisted goodies, with the assurance that they will not only be "done brown," but that they will emerge with a flavor and grain that will commend them to the favor of an epi- Doughnuts thus cooked are more digestible and of better flavor than if cooked in lard, and the most fastidious will not need to peel them before eating. Make the dough as soft as it can be handled; if cut about half an inch thick, five to eight minutes will be time enough to cook, but it is better to break one open as a test. When done, drain well in a skimmer, and place in a colander. The use of eggs prevents the dough from absorbing the fat. Doughnuts should be watched closely while frying, and the fire must be regucure. 1
This is a frying-fat lesson rather than a dough formula: how to judge the heat, and how to render your own beef tallow for the kettle. The dough recipes it serves sit elsewhere in the chapter.
- The hinge: fat temperatureDoughnuts want 365-375F. The old test works because the fat stops bubbling once the last traces of moisture have boiled off, which happens well above the boiling point of water; a clip-on thermometer removes the guesswork, and a test scrap of dough that browns in about 60 seconds confirms it.
- "Leaves" of suetLeaf fat is the firm kidney fat, the cleanest-tasting beef fat and the one worth rendering. It is no longer a standard supermarket item; ask a butcher to set some aside, as the text advises.
- Rendering scale and methodTen pounds of suet in a large stockpot with a pint of water is a full afternoon's work and yields roughly seven to eight pounds of tallow. The water keeps the fat from scorching before it liquefies and boils away on its own; hold the pot at a bare simmer, not "a good heat," and three hours is about right.
- Straining and storingStrain through a double layer of muslin rather than a coarse towel. Rendered tallow keeps several months refrigerated and a year frozen; at room temperature it will eventually go rancid.
- Roast-meat drippingsDrippings carry salt, browned juices and pan sediment, all of which scorch and smoke at frying temperature. If you use them, strain them cold and expect a savoury note in the doughnut.
- Lard has changedThe lard the author distrusted was rendered kettle lard. Most shelf-stable lard sold now is hydrogenated and stabilised, with a different flavour and a higher smoke point; leaf lard from a butcher is the closer equivalent.
- Frying timeFive to eight minutes for a half-inch cake is long by modern practice because the fat was rarely as hot or as stable as a thermostatted pot. At 365F, expect roughly 90 seconds a side; the break-one-open test remains the best check.
- Kettle managementFry in small batches. A crowded pan pulls the fat temperature down sharply, and dough frying in fat that has fallen too cool absorbs it instead of sealing, which is the greasiness the writer is arguing against.
- DrainingSkimmer to colander works, but a wire rack set over a tray drains better than a colander, where the cakes at the bottom steam in their own heat.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the great era of American compendium cookery, when a single volume tried to cover marketing, invalid cookery, laundry and cake, and when frying fat was something a household made rather than bought. The passage is unusually frank about who it is speaking to: alongside cooks who simply disliked greasy doughnuts, it addresses those who "Hebraically oppose lard" - an offhand nineteenth-century acknowledgement that Jewish households needed a frying medium other than pork fat, with beef fat the author's assumed answer. Judging fat by sight and sound, and rendering ten pounds of suet at a stretch, was ordinary domestic skill.