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No-Matters
1½ ozs. (3 tablespoonfuls) butter 1½ lb. (1 cup) sugar 1 teaspoonful lemon extract 1/2 pints (3 cups) sour milk 1 teaspoonful baking soda 1 teaspoonful baking powder Flour Apple sauce Cream the butter and sugar together; add the lemon extract, milk, soda, baking powder and enough flour to make a soft dough. Roll out and cut with a large cutter; fry in plenty of smoking hot fat. Drain, cover each with apple sauce, and place two together.
No-matters are sweet fritters filled with apple sauce.
A fried sweet dough sandwiched with apple sauce, written in the compressed style of an early twentieth-century household book. The quantities have lost a digit or two in printing, and the flour is left entirely to the cook's judgement.
- The measuresThe butter reads correctly: three tablespoons is about 1 1/2 ozs. The milk is printed as "1/2 pints" against 3 cups, which is 1 1/2 pints, and the sugar is printed as 1 1/2 lb. against 1 cup, which is 1/2 lb.; use the cup measures in both cases.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic, which reacted with the soda. Buttermilk is the standard modern substitute, cup for cup; milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice per cup is thinner in body, though it supplies comparable acid.
- Both soda and baking powderThe soda neutralises the acid in the milk and the baking powder supplies the rest of the rise. Do not drop either. Mix and fry promptly, as the reaction begins the moment the wet and dry meet.
- "Enough flour"The amount is left entirely to the cook, and this quantity of liquid will take a great deal of it. Work in flour until the dough is soft enough to be sticky but firm enough to roll and lift with a cutter; err on the slack side, as extra flour makes the fritters heavy.
- Frying temperature"Smoking hot" is the hinge and also the trap. Fat genuinely at its smoke point will burn the outside before the centre sets; hold the fat at 360 to 370F and fry two to three minutes, turning once, until deep gold through.
- Fat to useThe period cook would have used lard or beef drippings. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works. Use a depth of at least two inches so the rounds float rather than sit on the pan bottom.
- AssemblyDrain on a rack rather than paper so the undersides stay crisp, then spread apple sauce on one round and cap with a second. Assemble just before serving; the sauce softens the dough within minutes.
- YieldThis is a large batch for a household book, so expect a good many rounds from a large cutter, and half that number of filled no-matters once they are paired.
The name is a puzzle, and the book itself seems to feel it, closing with a one-line gloss for readers who would otherwise have no idea what was being offered. A route through Dutch or German immigrant cooking, where sweet fried doughs paired with stewed apple were everyday fare, has been suggested, but it is traditional supposition rather than anything documented. What the recipe does show clearly is the state of home baking in the period: sour milk was a resource rather than a waste product, and commercial baking powder had become common enough to be used alongside the older soda-and-acid method rather than instead of it. Frying in deep fat remained a quick route to a sweet course in a kitchen with a solid-fuel range.