Home › Pastries › Honey Doughnuts
Honey Doughnuts
3 eggs ½ cupful sugar. 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1½ cupfuls honey 1 cupful sour milk 1 teaspoonful baking soda 1 teaspoonful cream of tartar 1 teaspoonful lemon extract 5¾ cupfuls flour 1 teaspoonful salt Cream Crisco, honey and sugar well together, then add eggs well beaten, mix well, add milk, lemon extract, flour, salt, soda, and cream of Breads, etc. tartar. Mix and turn out on baking board, roll out and cut with doughnut cutter. Fry in plenty of hot Crisco. If a piece of bread browns in hot Crisco in sixty seconds, temperature is right for doughnuts and fritters. Sufficient for sixty-five doughnuts. ½ cupful sugar
The ingredient list in the original is scrambled — the sugar has slid to the end, the flour is set as "53/4" (five and three-quarter cupfuls), and the eggs appear only in the method. A few decisions have to be made before you start.
- The missing eggsThe method calls for "eggs well beaten" but the list omits them entirely. Two or three whole eggs would suit a batch of this size; two is the safer choice with this much honey, which already contributes moisture.
- Crisco and what to use insteadCrisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, firmer and blander than butter and sold hard in a tin. Modern vegetable shortening behaves the same way in the dough; for the frying fat any neutral oil with a high smoke point works as well.
- Sour milkThis meant naturally soured raw milk, mildly acidic and slightly thickened. Buttermilk is the direct substitute; a cup of milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes will also do.
- Soda plus cream of tartarOne teaspoon of each supplies acid and alkali together, but with more soda than the cream of tartar can neutralise; a cream-of-tartar baking powder is usually nearer two parts cream of tartar to one of soda. You can substitute about two teaspoons of double-acting baking powder, keeping roughly half a teaspoon of soda as well, since the sour milk and honey both need neutralising.
- Honey browns fastA cup and a half of honey is a great deal of sugar in a fried dough. These will colour noticeably sooner than a plain doughnut, so judge doneness by feel and time rather than by deep colour, and expect them to darken further as they drain.
- The bread test, in numbersA cube of bread browning in sixty seconds corresponds to roughly 360–375F. With honey in the dough, stay at the lower end; hotter fat will set the outside dark before the centre cooks.
- Handle the dough gentlyHoney-sweetened dough is sticky and slack. Chill it before rolling, flour the board lightly, and work in batches — re-rolling scraps repeatedly toughens them.
- YieldSixty-five doughnuts is a very large batch. Halving the recipe works straightforwardly, using one egg for the half batch.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was a promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a product nobody had asked for: a solid white vegetable fat, hydrogenated from cottonseed oil, launched in 1911 as a replacement for both lard and butter. Frying recipes figure prominently, and the qualities P&G advertised for Crisco — a high smoke point, no animal flavour, and a keeping quality said to be better than lard's — were claims that showed to best advantage in a kettle of hot fat. Doughnuts in particular had long been fried in lard, and the book returns to them repeatedly. The honey here reflects a period habit of substituting honey for part of the sugar in sweet doughs, for flavour; the sour milk is a survival from the era when milk soured at home as a matter of course and cooks paired it with soda for lift. The garbled ingredient list is the sort of typesetting slip common in cheaply produced advertising cookbooks.