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Crullers and Doughnuts (Salt-spoon soda Boil ten)
a salt-spoon soda. Boil ten minutes in a pint pure soft water; when cool bottle and cork for use. This is used for jellies, cake, ice-cream, etc. - Mrs W. E. H., Minneapolis.
This is the tail end of a recipe: the page break has taken the ingredient list with it, and only the finishing directions survive. What remains is a boiled, bottled flavouring or colouring liquid of the kind community cookbooks kept on hand for jellies, cakes and ice-cream, and the individual instructions are still legible enough to translate.
- The recipe is incompleteEverything before "a salt-spoon soda" is missing, so the substance being flavoured or coloured is unknown. There is nothing here to follow start to finish; read it as a fragment rather than a working formula.
- Salt-spoonA salt-spoon is the smallest spoon in a Victorian cruet set, usually reckoned at about a quarter teaspoon. It was one of the small measures nineteenth-century cookbooks relied on before graduated measuring-spoon sets became common, though such measures were not standardised.
- Soda"Soda" in an American cookbook of this period means bicarbonate of soda, that is, baking soda, not washing soda or lye. Saleratus, an older leavener originally potassium-based, is a closely related product and the two names are sometimes used loosely in books of this vintage.
- PintA US pint is 16 fluid ounces, two cups. Ten minutes' boiling will evaporate some of that, so the finished yield will be somewhat less than a pint.
- Pure soft waterSoft water means water low in dissolved calcium and magnesium, which nineteenth-century households commonly collected as rainwater; boiling removes some hardness. Hard water can affect the clarity and colour of infusions, which may be the concern here. Distilled water is the simplest modern equivalent.
- Why the sodaWith the main ingredient missing, the purpose of the soda cannot be determined from the fragment. Alkali added to a plant infusion shifts the pH and alters pigments, and can neutralise acidity; in a bottled liquid of this sort a leavening role seems unlikely, but the text does not say.
- Bottle and corkA corked bottle is not a hermetic seal, so this was never a shelf-stable preserve in the modern sense; it was a working supply used up over weeks. Anything made this way today belongs in a clean, tightly closed jar in the refrigerator, and should be discarded at the first sign of cloudiness or off smell.
The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to the great wave of compiled American community cookbooks of the 1880s, in which recipes arrived from contributors across the country and were credited, as here, by initials and town: Mrs W. E. H. of Minneapolis is a long way from Dixie. Homemade flavouring and colouring liquids are often said to have been a routine part of that household economy. Commercial extracts and food dyes existed but were expensive and widely adulterated, and cooks are generally thought to have brewed their own from fruit juices, spices, cochineal or vegetable matter, boiled them down, and bottled them for the season's jellies, cakes and ice-creams. The instruction to use "pure soft water" is a reminder that water quality was a variable a cook had to manage herself, and the casual pinch of soda reflects a period in which alkali was reached for as freely for colour and texture as for leavening. The garbled heading here, with directions sitting under a crullers-and-doughnuts running title, is typical of how densely these volumes were set: several unrelated recipes to the page, with entries routinely broken across the fold.