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North Star Doughnuts
One and a half cups sugar, one of sour milk, half cup butter, three eggs, a level tea-spoon soda, spice to taste, and flour to roll. — Mrs. A. J. Palmes,
A terse cake-doughnut formula of the kind that assumed every reader already knew to roll, cut and fry. The quantities are sound; only the frying instructions are missing entirely.
- Sour milkThis means genuinely soured raw milk, thick and acidic, which reacted with the soda for lift. Cultured buttermilk is the closest current substitute; a cup of milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes will also work, though it is thinner.
- Soda, not baking powderThe level teaspoon of soda is doing all the leavening and depends on the acid in the milk. If you substitute sweet milk the doughnuts will be flat and taste faintly soapy.
- "Flour to roll"Expect roughly 4 to 4 1/2 cups. Add it gradually and stop as soon as the dough holds a shape under the rolling pin: a soft dough that just barely handles gives a tender doughnut, while a stiff one fries up dry and bready.
- "Spice to taste"For this period that generally meant nutmeg, sometimes with cinnamon or a little mace. A teaspoon of grated nutmeg for the whole batch is a fair reading.
- The frying, which the recipe omitsRoll about 1/3 inch thick, cut with a doughnut cutter, and fry in deep fat at 365F, roughly two minutes to the first side and one to one and a half to the second. Below 350F they soak up grease; above 375F the outside colours before the centre sets.
- Chilling the doughHalf an hour in the refrigerator makes a soft dough far easier to roll and cut, and the doughnuts hold their edges better in the fat.
- YieldAbout two and a half to three dozen doughnuts plus holes, depending on the cutter. They are best within hours of frying.
- FrostingFinishing -- Cake doughnuts of this sort were often rolled in granulated or sifted sugar while still warm. A thin confectioners' sugar glaze applied after they have cooled will set rather than slide off.
Sour-milk doughnuts belong to a period when milk soured reliably and usefully on the kitchen shelf, and cooks kept a use for it — soda reacting with the lactic acid was the cheapest leavening a household had. The Dixie Cook Book, like most late nineteenth-century American compilations, was assembled from contributed receipts credited by name; the instructions attributed to Mrs. A. J. Palmes are compressed to bare proportions, with no advice on rolling or frying. The name "North Star" may be decorative rather than descriptive — the era was fond of attaching patriotic and regional titles to otherwise plain cakes and cookies — though "North Star" is also Minnesota's own nickname, and nothing in the book itself settles whether a Minnesota connection was intended.