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Fried Cakes (Mrs S McMaster two)
Mrs. S. McMaster. two and one-half cups sweet milk, two cups sugar, two tears of cream of tartar, one of soda; spices to taste; roll out and cut in shapes, and fry in boiling lard; while hot dip in fine sugar.
A doughnut recipe of the barest kind, printed as contributors' recipes usually were — with the assumption that any cook knew what to add and how much. Read the first point before you start.
- The flour is missingThere is no flour in the list, and without it there is nothing to roll out. Contributors' cookbooks of this period sometimes left the bulk ingredient unstated, apparently expecting the cook to add flour until the dough was stiff enough to handle. Expect somewhere in the range of 6 to 8 cups for this quantity of liquid, worked in gradually; the exact figure cannot be recovered from the text.
- "Two tears"Most likely a misprint for "two teaspoons" of cream of tartar, against one of soda. A 2:1 ratio of cream of tartar to soda was the usual homemade stand-in for baking powder, and it works out to roughly four teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured milk — the distinction mattered when much household milk had gone acid and was used with soda alone. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- No eggs, no shorteningNeither appears in the list: these are lean, plain cakes leavened chemically rather than rich ones. They will be cakier and drier than a modern doughnut, and are best eaten within a few hours.
- "Boiling lard"Fat does not boil; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble vigorously when a scrap of dough is dropped in. That is 365–375F. Below 350F the cakes drink fat and turn greasy; above 385F they brown before the centre sets.
- Fine sugarProbably finely sifted granulated sugar rather than modern confectioners' sugar; closest today to caster or superfine. Dip while the surface is still hot so it clings.
- SpicesFor fried cakes of this period that means nutmeg first, often with cinnamon, sometimes a little mace. A teaspoon of grated nutmeg for this batch is not excessive.
- YieldTwo and a half cups of milk with two of sugar is a large batch — three to four dozen cakes cut at two and a half inches. Halve it unless you are feeding a crowd, since they do not keep.
"Fried cakes" was the ordinary North American name for what most people now call doughnuts, and in nineteenth-century household books the two terms sit side by side, often with "crullers" and "olykoeks" nearby — the last a reminder of the Dutch fried dough generally credited with bringing the form to America. What marks this version as later rather than earlier is the leavening: no yeast, no long rising, just cream of tartar and soda, the pairing that let a cook mix, roll, cut and fry inside an hour. The Home Cook Book was compiled from recipes sent in by named contributors, which is why Mrs. S. McMaster appears more than once and why her instructions are so compressed; she was writing for neighbours who already knew that fried cakes needed flour, and how much."}