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Poor Man's Doughnuts
Mrs. George Virtue.
One quart of flour, two saltspoons of salt, four tea spoonsful Cook's Friend baking powder, one and onehalf cups of sugar, one cup of milk, nutmeg.
This is an ingredient list rather than a set of instructions, in the shorthand style common to community cookbooks whose contributors assumed everyone already knew how doughnuts were made. The gaps are worth naming before you start.
- The missing methodNothing here tells you to fry anything, or how thick to roll, or how hot the fat should be. Working from standard practice for cake doughnuts, the dry ingredients would be sifted together, the milk worked in to make a stiff rolled dough, cut with a doughnut cutter, and fried in deep fat until browned on both sides; modern guidance for such doughnuts puts the fat in the region of 360-370F, but that figure is ours, not the book's.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume in these books: a quart is 4 cups, about 1 lb 2 oz of modern all-purpose flour. Spoon it into the cup and level it rather than scooping, or you will be well over.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two of them is half a teaspoon of salt.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian brand of the period, still sold today. Four teaspoons to four cups of flour is close to the modern standard ratio of one teaspoon per cup, so substitute an equal quantity of any double-acting baking powder.
- Why "poor man's"There are no eggs and no butter or lard in the dough, which is precisely the point of the name. Expect a plainer, drier, more biscuit-like doughnut than a modern raised or cake doughnut, and eat them the day they are made.
- The liquid is tightOne cup of milk to four cups of flour with no fat or egg will give a very stiff, crumbly dough. Add milk a spoonful at a time until it just holds together and can be rolled without cracking; hold back rather than overshooting, since a slack dough soaks up frying fat.
- NutmegNo quantity is given. Half a teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg suits this amount of flour; the older books meant whole nutmeg grated at the stove, which is markedly stronger than pre-ground.
- YieldRoughly two to three dozen doughnuts of ordinary size, depending on your cutter, plus the holes.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in the 1870s by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold to raise money for the Hospital for Sick Children, which is why many receipts carry a contributor's name like Mrs. George Virtue. Recipes titled "poor man's" something were a standing convention of nineteenth-century household cookery: the phrase signalled a version stripped of the expensive ingredients, here the eggs and butter that a richer doughnut would carry, leaving flour, sugar, milk and leavening. The named brand is itself a period marker. Cook's Friend baking powder was a Canadian product, and chemical leavening was still new enough in the 1870s that a cook might specify a make by name.