Home › Pastries › Fried Cakes with Apple Sauce
Fried Cakes with Apple Sauce
1 cupful sugar 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 3 cupfuls sour milk 1/4 teaspoonful grated nutmeg 1 teaspoonful lemon extract 1 teaspoonful baking soda 1 teaspoonful baking powder ½ teaspoonful salt Flour Apple sauce Cream Crisco, gradually add sugar, then add salt, nutmeg, lemon, soda, baking powder, sour milk and sufficient flour to make stiffish dough. Roll out on floured baking board, cut with large round cutter, and fry in hot Crisco until well cooked and nicely browned on both sides. Drain and serve with hot apple sauce.
Sufficient for twenty cakes. 1 teaspoonful salt 2 cupfuls brown sugar 1 cupful Crisco
A plain sour-milk doughnut dough, fried and served under hot apple sauce. Two things need sorting before you start: the flour is unmeasured, and the last three lines have nothing to do with this recipe.
- The stray ingredientsThe trailing "1 teaspoonful salt / 2 cupfuls brown sugar / 1 cupful Crisco" does not belong to this method; it looks like stray text carried over from an adjacent recipe. Ignore it; the method never calls for brown sugar, and salt is already listed above.
- Flour is up to youWith 3 cups of sour milk you will need a great deal of flour, quite possibly 8 cups or more, to reach a rollable dough. Add it in stages and stop when the dough just holds a shape under the rolling pin — pushed further it fries dense and dry.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic. Buttermilk is the direct modern stand-in; failing that, whole milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar per cup, left ten minutes.
- Why both soda and baking powderThe soda reacts with the acid in the sour milk and gives the lift; the baking powder supplies additional leavening. The book gives no reason for using both. Don't drop either.
- Frying temperatureThe book gives no temperature. Modern practice for frying doughnuts is roughly 365-375F, in at least 2 inches of fat. Much below 350F the cakes drink fat; much hotter and the outside colours before the crumb sets. Fry in small batches so the temperature holds.
- Roll thick, not thinAbout 1/2 inch. These are cut as solid rounds, not rings, so they need the extra time in the fat — figure 1 1/2 to 2 minutes a side and break one open to check the centre before committing the batch.
- Chill the doughNot in the original, but 30 minutes in the refrigerator makes a slack sour-milk dough far easier to cut and keeps the cakes from spreading in the fat.
- Yield and servingTwenty cakes, so eight to ten people. Serve the apple sauce hot and unsweetened or barely sweetened — the cakes carry a full cup of sugar.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a product that had appeared only two years earlier: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a shortening that behaved like lard but was shelf-stable, neutral in flavour, and — a point the company made much of — contained no animal fat, which brought it kosher and vegetarian customers. A recipe that used the same fat for creaming the batter and for filling the kettle showed off Crisco's double duty, at a time when fried cakes were commonly cooked in lard or drippings. The cakes themselves are older than the shortening; they are usually traced to the Dutch olykoeks of New Amsterdam, though that line of descent is traditional rather than documented, and solid rounds rather than rings were still being cut in American kitchens.