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Fried Cakes
Mrs. Carson.
One cup of sugar, two eggs, half a cup of shortening, one teaspoon of soda, one cup of sour milk, cut in rings ; have your lard very hot, in which place a peeled potato to keep lard from burning, and drop in your cakes; they will come to the top of lard when light; fry a dark brown ; when taken out sprinkle sugar over them.
A short-form doughnut recipe of the kind written for cooks who already knew the dough by feel. The one thing it omits is the flour, which is the whole problem to solve before you begin.
- The missing flourNo quantity is given because the writer assumed you would add flour until the dough was just stiff enough to roll. With one cup each of sugar and sour milk, expect somewhere around 3 1/2 to 4 cups of flour; work in the smaller amount first and stop while the dough is still soft and slightly tacky. Too much flour is the usual cause of heavy, bready fried cakes.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means raw milk that has clabbered naturally, not spoiled pasteurised milk. Use buttermilk, or add a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice to a cup of milk and let it stand ten minutes. The teaspoon of soda needs that acid to work; without it the cakes will not rise and will taste soapy.
- ShorteningHere this means lard or butter, softened rather than melted. Half a cup is about 4 oz. Modern vegetable shortening or butter both work; butter gives more flavour and slightly firmer cakes.
- "Cut in rings"Roll about 1/3 inch thick and cut with a doughnut cutter or two round cutters. Thinner than that and the centres dry out before the outsides colour.
- Fat temperature"very hot" lard is around 360-375F in modern terms. The peeled potato was a common period trick, said to keep the fat from scorching and to sweeten it, though a thermometer does the job of controlling the heat better. Below 350F the cakes soak up grease; above 385F they brown before the middle sets.
- "Fry a dark brown"Take this as deep golden brown rather than literally dark. Turn each cake once when it rises and the underside has coloured, roughly 60-90 seconds a side. Sugar in the dough makes them colour faster than a plain batter.
- YieldThis quantity gives roughly two dozen cakes plus holes. Sprinkle the sugar while they are still hot enough for it to cling, and drain on a rack, not on paper, so the bottoms stay crisp.
"Fried cakes" was the ordinary American name for what most people now call a doughnut, and through the nineteenth century the two terms sat side by side in cookbooks, used more or less interchangeably for both the yeast-raised sort and the quicker chemically leavened batter seen here. The soda-and-sour-milk pairing that makes this dough rise was the workhorse leavening of the mid-century North American kitchen: with a milk cow in the yard, soured milk was a daily by-product rather than something bought, and saleratus or soda was cheap and shelf-stable long before commercial baking powder became a fixture. The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from contributions by named local women, which is why this appears over Mrs. Carson's name and in her own shorthand "cut in rings", "fry a dark brown", no flour measure at all. The potato dropped in the lard is a widely repeated household trick of the era, said to keep the fat from scorching and to sweeten it for reuse, an economy that mattered when a kettle of lard was expected to serve many batches.