Home › Supper › French Doughnuts
French Doughnuts
Prepare plain Doughnuts. After frying and cooling, cover one side with plain vanilla, mocha or chocolate icing.
This is a finishing instruction rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have the book's plain doughnut dough and a bowl of icing. A few things need filling in.
- What "plain Doughnuts" means hereThe base is the book's own plain doughnut recipe, which is not reproduced on this page. In cookbooks of this period a "plain doughnut" is usually a cake doughnut rolled and cut with a ring cutter rather than a yeast-raised one, so any standard cake-doughnut recipe will stand in.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe gives none; period books judge the fat by dropping in a scrap of dough and watching it brown in about a minute, which in modern terms is roughly the middle-to-high 300sF. Fat that is too cool leaves the doughnuts greasy; too hot and the outside colours before the crumb sets.
- Cool completely, not just brieflyThe instruction says "after frying and cooling" for a reason: icing applied to a warm doughnut melts, slides off the domed side and dulls. Leave them on a rack until they are cool and the surface is dry to the touch.
- The three icingsVanilla here is a water or milk icing — roughly 1 cup confectioners' sugar to 1 tablespoon liquid plus a few drops of vanilla. For mocha, use strong cold coffee as the liquid; for chocolate, sift in 1 to 2 tablespoons cocoa and add a little more liquid to loosen it.
- Icing consistencyAim for something that ribbons thickly off a spoon and settles smooth in a few seconds. Too thin and it runs into the hole and off the sides; too thick and it drags the fried crust.
- How to coat one sideDip the flatter face straight into the bowl, lift, and let the excess drip back before setting it icing-up on the rack. Trying to spread icing with a knife tears the surface.
- YieldA standard plain doughnut recipe built on 3 to 3 1/2 cups flour will give somewhere around 18 to 24 doughnuts plus holes; expect to need something like 3/4 cup of icing to cover that many on one side.
"French" attached to a fried sweet in American cookbooks of this period often means little that is traceable to France; it tended to serve as a general marker of refinement. What distinguishes these from plain doughnuts is only the icing, at a time when the everyday doughnut was commonly finished with nothing more than a shake of granulated sugar or cinnamon. That mocha appears alongside vanilla and chocolate is a good period detail: coffee-flavoured icings were fashionable around the turn of the twentieth century, and "mocha" then generally meant coffee flavour rather than the coffee-and-chocolate combination the word suggests now.