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Raised Doughnuts
1 cupful milk 1/4 cupful lukewarm water ¼ yeast cake 1½ teaspoonfuls salt Flour 1 cupful sugar 1/4 cupful Crisco 2 eggs 1 teaspoonful grated nutmeg Dissolve yeast cake in lukewarm water. Scald milk and cool, then add yeast, half teaspoonful of the salt and flour to make a drop batter. Set in a cosy place to rise. Cream Crisco with sugar, add eggs well beaten, remainder of salt and nutmeg, add to yeast mixture with enough flour to make stiff dough; let rise again. When risen, make into small balls and place in a Criscoed pan to rise. When light drop into plenty of hot Crisco and cook from four to five minutes until doughnuts are done. Drain on soft paper and dredge with powdered sugar.
Sufficient for seventy doughnuts.
A yeast-raised doughnut from Procter & Gamble's 1913 promotional cookbook, written when Crisco was a novelty and every recipe in the book named it as often as possible. The method is sound; the quantities and the frying time need attention.
- About the yeastThe printed page gives a quarter of a yeast cake, which is what the text now reads. A compressed cake of that era ran about 0.6 oz, so a quarter cake is roughly half a teaspoon of modern active dry yeast; a full 2 1/4-teaspoon packet works too, with a shorter rise.
- Crisco is still CriscoIt is vegetable shortening, and the modern product is the same idea though reformulated to remove trans fats. Butter or lard will work in the dough; for the frying fat any neutral oil with a high smoke point does the job.
- Frying temperatureThe book says only "hot Crisco." Aim for 365-375F and keep it there — below 350F the doughnuts drink fat, above 385F they brown before the centre sets.
- Four to five minutes is too longThat timing suits a large, cold-centred ball dropped into fat that has cooled. Small raised doughnuts at 365F need roughly 1 to 1 1/2 minutes a side. Cut one open from the first batch and adjust rather than trusting the clock.
- Scalding the milkThe usual explanation is that heating denatures a component of raw milk (commonly described as a whey protein or enzyme) that weakens gluten; period cooks also scalded raw milk as a matter of course. Pasteurised milk needs only to be warmed to about 110F before the yeast goes in.
- "A cosy place"Around 75-80F. A turned-off oven with the light on works. The sponge should be bubbly and roughly doubled, about an hour; the second rise takes a similar time.
- Balls, not ringsThese are shaped as filled-style rounds with no hole, so the centres take longer to cook than a ring doughnut. Keep them small — about 1 1/4 inches — or the outside will be dark before the middle is done.
- YieldSeventy doughnuts from one cup of milk means very small balls indeed; expect 30 to 40 at a more usual size. The dough halves cleanly if that is too many.
- SugaringPowdered sugar dissolves and goes patchy on a hot, slightly greasy doughnut. Let them cool a minute or two on paper first, or use granulated sugar while still warm.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was not a cookbook in the ordinary sense but an advertisement bound like one: Procter & Gamble had introduced hydrogenated cottonseed oil in 1911 and needed to persuade American cooks to abandon lard and butter for a white, odourless, shelf-stable fat that came in a can. The recipes were supplied by Marion Harris Neil, a working cookery writer, and the house style required the trade name in nearly every line — from "a Criscoed pan" and "plenty of hot Crisco." Raised doughnuts themselves long predate the product; the Dutch oliekoek, a yeasted ball of dough fried in fat, is generally credited as the ancestor of the American doughnut, and nutmeg is often said to have been its standard spice since the nineteenth century. What the book was really selling here was the frying fat: deep-frying used pounds of it at a time, spoilage was a genuine household expense, and shortening that kept in the pantry without turning rancid was the argument Crisco made best.