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Rich Doughnuts
1 cupful sugar. 5 tablespoonfuls Crisco 3 eggs 4 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1½ teaspoonfuls salt 1 cupful milk 1 teaspoonful grated nutmeg Flour to make soft dough From 4½ to 5 cupfuls flour sifted before measuring. Cream Crisco, add sugar gradually, and eggs well beaten. Sift dry ingredients and add alternately to egg mixture. Roll out as soft as can be handled. Cut with cutter and fry in hot Crisco. Heat Crisco until crumb of bread becomes golden brown in sixty seconds.
Sufficient for sixty doughnuts.
A standard cake-doughnut formula from a fat manufacturer's promotional book, written when the point was to show that a vegetable shortening fried as well as lard. It scales down easily.
- The missing sugarSugar appears in the method — "add sugar gradually" — but no quantity is given in the ingredient list. A cake doughnut of this size normally takes about 1 cupful; anything less and the dough will taste flat and brown poorly.
- Flour quantityThe flour line reads "From 42 to 5 cupfuls," which cannot be right. Read it as roughly 4½ to 5 cupfuls, sifted before measuring, and add only as much as the dough needs.
- Sifted before measuringThat instruction changes the weight considerably. A cup of flour sifted first runs about 4 oz, against 4½–5 oz scooped. Sift onto paper, spoon into the cup, level it off.
- Crisco, then and nowCrisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a solid white shortening. Modern Crisco is a reformulated soybean/palm blend labelled as containing no trans fat per serving; it creams and fries much the same way. Any solid vegetable shortening works, and 5 tablespoonfuls is about 65 g.
- Frying temperatureThe bread-cube test — golden brown in sixty seconds — corresponds to roughly 365–375°F. Below that the dough drinks fat and turns greasy; above it the outside sets before the centre cooks. A thermometer is more reliable than the crumb.
- Handling a soft dough"Roll out as soft as can be handled" is the hinge of the recipe. A stiff dough makes heavy, bready doughnuts. Chill the dough an hour, flour the board generously, and roll to about ⅜ inch.
- YieldSixty doughnuts is a household-of-the-period quantity. Halving or quartering the recipe is straightforward, and the frying goes better in small batches anyway — crowding the pot drops the fat temperature fast.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco went on sale, and it is a sales document as much as a cookbook: nearly every recipe in it calls for the product, often in both the batter and the frying kettle. Doughnuts were a shrewd choice to feature. They had long been fried in lard or beef drippings, fats that carried a distinct flavour and, in warm weather, went rancid; a bland, shelf-stable white shortening was an easy argument to make to a cook who had been skimming and clarifying her own frying fat for years. Nutmeg is a common marker of the American cake doughnut, and it appears here as it does in many earlier recipes.