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Nut Doughnuts
1¼ cupfuls sugar 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1½ cupfuls milk 2 eggs 4 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1 cupful chopped English walnut meats 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract 1 teaspoonful lemon extract 1/2 teaspoonful salt Flour to make soft dough Cream Crisco and sugar together, add eggs well beaten, milk, salt, extracts, baking powder, nuts, and sufficient flour to make soft dough .
Roll out, cut with cutter and fry in hot Crisco to a golden color. Drain and sift with sugar.
Sufficient for seventy-five doughnuts.
A plain cake-doughnut dough from Procter & Gamble's 1913 Crisco booklet, written for cooks who measured flour by feel. Two figures in it need reading with suspicion before you start.
- Sugar quantityThe printed page reads 1¼ cupfuls sugar, which is what our text now gives. That is the right proportion for a batch built on 1½ cups milk and 2 eggs.
- The yield is optimisticSeventy-five doughnuts from this much dough would mean tiny rings. Expect roughly 30 to 36 doughnuts at a 2½-inch cutter, plus holes, and scale the recipe down by half if you are not feeding a crowd.
- "Flour to make soft dough"Plan on 4½ to 5½ cups of all-purpose flour, added a cup at a time until the dough just holds together and is barely rollable. Cake doughnuts turn tough and bready the moment you go past soft and slightly tacky.
- Frying temperature"Hot Crisco" means 365 to 375F on a thermometer. Below that the rings drink fat; above it the outside colors before the crumb sets. About 1½ minutes a side is usual.
- Crisco as shortening and as frying fatThe booklet used the same product for both jobs, which is why it appears twice. Any solid vegetable shortening works in the dough; for the kettle, a neutral oil with a high smoke point is equivalent.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons spread over roughly five cups of flour works out below one teaspoon per cup, which is in line with, not above, modern practice. Use double-acting powder and get the dough into the fat reasonably promptly rather than letting it stand an hour.
- Chill before rollingNot in the original, but 30 minutes in the refrigerator makes a soft dough with a cup of walnuts in it far easier to roll and cut without overworking.
- "Sift with sugar"Dust with granulated or confectioners' sugar through a sieve while the doughnuts are still warm but drained, so it clings without dissolving into syrup.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was a promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product with no culinary tradition behind it. Frying recipes carried the argument well: shortening was sold as cleaner-tasting and less prone to carrying flavors between batches than lard or drippings. Cake doughnuts leavened with baking powder rather than yeast were already standard American home baking by then, and "English walnut" simply distinguished the familiar Juglans regia from the native black walnut, which has a much stronger flavor.