Home › Directions For Frosting › Crullers
Crullers
Two coffee-cups sugar, one of sweet milk, three eggs, a heaping table-spoon butter, three tea-spoons baking-powder mixed with six cups flour, half a nutmeg, and a level tea-spoon cinnamon. Beat eggs, sugar and butter together, add milk, spices and flour; put another cup flour on molding-board, turn the dough out on it, and knead until stiff enough to roll out to a quarter inch thick; cut in squares, make three or four long incisions in each square, lift by taking alternate strips between the finger and thumb, drop into hot lard, and cook like doughnuts. - Mrs. A. F. Ziegler, Columbus,
A plain cake-doughnut dough, cut in slashed squares and pulled open so the strips fry into a lattice. The dough is the whole game: it must be stiff enough to hold those strips apart in the fat.
- Coffee-cupA coffee-cup in American receipts of this period is close to a standard 8 oz cup, sometimes a little under. Treat the two cups sugar and one cup milk as ordinary cups and adjust with the reserve flour.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk that older recipes paired with saleratus. No substitution needed.
- Flour is a range, not a numberSix cups plus another on the board is a lot for three eggs and one cup of milk. Modern flour is stronger and more finely milled; start with five, add only enough on the board to make a dough you can roll a quarter inch thick without it sticking.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to six or seven cups of flour is light by current practice, which runs nearer a teaspoon per cup. The result will be dense and slightly chewy rather than puffed; leave it as written unless you want a cakier cruller.
- Half a nutmegA whole nutmeg grates to roughly two to three teaspoons, so half is about a teaspoon and a bit. Grate it fresh; pre-ground nutmeg at that quantity tastes dusty.
- Frying fat and temperatureLard is the original and gives the cleanest flavour, but any neutral fat with a high smoke point works. Hold the fat at 365-375F: below that the crullers drink oil, above it the lattice colours before the centre sets. Two to three minutes total, turning once.
- The liftCutting the slashes is easy; the shape comes from picking up alternate strips so the square opens into a twisted lattice. Do it directly over the pot and lower the piece in gently, or it collapses back on itself.
- Don't crowd the potThree or four at a time in a deep pan. Each addition drops the fat temperature, and a lattice that sits in cool fat goes greasy and pale.
- YieldA batch this size will give several dozen crullers, though the count depends entirely on how large you cut the squares. They are best within a few hours; sugar them warm if at all.
Crullers likely reached American kitchens by way of the Dutch krullen, to curl, and the name has generally described the shape rather than a fixed dough. Nineteenth-century books use it for anything cut, twisted or slashed and fried in deep fat, distinguishing it from the round doughnut mainly by that manipulation of the dough. This version, leavened with baking powder rather than yeast or saleratus, points to the later part of the century, once commercial chemical leavening was widely available. The Dixie Cook-Book, like other compiled community books of the period, credits receipts to the women who supplied them — here Mrs. A. F. Ziegler of Columbus.