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Sweet Milk Doughnuts
4 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt teaspoon cinnamon or nutmeg Flour to make a soft dough (3 to 4 cups) • Cream the fat, add the sugar, add the milk and well-beaten egg. Add 3 cups flour mixed and sifted with dry ingredients, then enough more flour to make dough just stiff enough to roll. With knife, toss about 1/3 of dough on lightly-floured board, knead slightly to make smooth. Roll to thickness of about 1 inch. Use floured spatula freely to prevent dough from sticking to board. Cut with floured doughnut cutter. Fry in deep fat about 2 minutes. They should come quickly to the top. Brown on one side, turn and brown on the other. Turn but once. Drain over fat and then on absorbent paper. When partly cool, or just before serving, sprinkle with powdered sugar, if desired. 1 cup flour teaspoon salt
A plain baking-powder doughnut of the kind that dominated American home frying before yeast-raised rings took over commercially. The method is sound; a few of the working numbers need translating.
- Fat temperature"Deep fat" here means 365-375F. Below that the rings soak grease before the crumb sets; above 385F the outside colors long before the center cooks through. A thermometer is worth more than any visual test, though the recipe's own cue -- rings that "come quickly to the top" -- is a reasonable confirmation.
- Rolled thicknessThe printed "about 1 inch" is almost certainly a fraction lost in transcription; one inch could not fry through in two minutes. Roll about 1/4 to 1/3 inch, the usual thickness for a cake doughnut. Much thicker than half an inch and the centre will still be raw when the outside is brown.
- "Sweet milk"Ordinary fresh milk, named to distinguish it from the soured milk or buttermilk used in recipes leavened with saleratus. Whole milk gives the best crumb here; the recipe was not written for skim.
- Turn but onceThe recipe is explicit about this: brown one side fully, flip, finish, and lift out. Period books consistently warn that repeated turning makes for greasier doughnuts.
- The fat for creamingThe recipe says only "the fat," leaving the choice open. Lard, butter, or a vegetable shortening will all work; shortening gives a more tender result, butter more flavour and faster browning.
- Ingredient quantitiesThe leavening, salt, spice and flour are specified, but the amounts of fat, sugar, milk and egg are not stated in the list as printed here, so the proportions cannot be recovered from the page. Use a comparable cake-doughnut formula for those four.
- YieldThree to four cups of flour makes roughly 18 to 24 doughnuts plus holes, depending on cutter size.
- SugaringThe recipe allows either "partly cool" or "just before serving." Sugaring while still slightly warm gives the best adhesion; piping hot and the sugar melts into syrup.
Cake doughnuts leavened with baking powder are a product of the late nineteenth century, when reliable commercial baking powder let cooks abandon both yeast sponges and the soda-and-sour-milk trick that gave doughnuts a faint tang and a yellowish crumb. Recipes of the era are routinely titled by their liquid -- "sweet milk" against "sour milk" doughnuts -- because that single choice determined which leavening you reached for. The book itself belongs to a genre of free promotional cookery pamphlets issued by insurance companies and manufacturers to American households in the first half of the twentieth century, which is often said to explain why the instructions are so procedural: on the conventional account they were written for cooks who had no other cookbook, and the fussy details about flouring the spatula and turning only once are the sort of thing an experienced kitchen would presumably never have needed spelled out.