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Doughnuts (One cupful of sugar one cupful)
One cupful of sugar, one cupful of buttermilk; dissolve sugar in buttermilk, one egg without beating, add egg to milk and sugar, nutmeg, pinch of salt, one tablespoonful of soft lard, one teaspoonful of soda sifted in three cupfuls of flour. Beat sugar, milk and egg well together, add lard, nutmeg, salt and flour, with soda; make a soft dough and fry. Very good.
A plain buttermilk doughnut with no rising time and no temperature given — the original assumes you know what a doughnut kettle looks like when it is ready. Two things need pinning down: the frying fat and the handling of a very soft dough.
- Fat temperatureFry at 360–370F. Below that the dough drinks fat and turns greasy; above it the outside colours before the centre sets. A cube of bread browning in about 60 seconds is the period test, but a thermometer is better.
- "Soft lard"Lard at room temperature, soft enough to beat in, not melted. A tablespoon is all the fat in three cups of flour, so these are lean and cakey rather than rich. Shortening or softened butter substitutes without trouble.
- Soda and buttermilkThe teaspoon of soda is the only leavening and it reacts on contact with the acid buttermilk. Mix, cut and fry without delay — dough left standing loses lift and fries flat.
- Flour is a guide, not a ruleThree cups is a starting point; modern flour and cup measures differ from period practice. Add only enough to make a dough you can pat out to about half an inch on a well-floured board. Erring toward soft gives a tender doughnut; erring toward stiff gives a tough one.
- Nutmeg quantityThe original leaves it open. Half a teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg suits this amount of dough; nutmeg is the spice that turns up most often in doughnut recipes of this kind.
- Frying fat depth and batchesTwo to three inches of fat in a deep, heavy pan. Fry a few at a time so the temperature does not crash, turning once when the underside is deep gold — roughly 90 seconds a side for half-inch rings.
- YieldIf rolled and cut with a three-inch cutter, something in the region of 18 to 24 doughnuts plus the holes; the original does not say how they were shaped. Best within a few hours.
Doughnuts of this type — buttermilk and soda rather than yeast — belong to the American nineteenth-century kitchen, where the spread of reliable chemical leavening meant a fried cake could be mixed and cooked in one sitting instead of waiting on a sponge. The older yeast-raised "olykoek" is generally traced to Dutch settlement in New York, while sour-milk-and-saleratus versions were common in household manuals by the later nineteenth century; buttermilk was in any case a byproduct that butter-making households had on hand. Nutmeg is the seasoning that recurs most often in these recipes. The terse closing verdict, "Very good," is the kind of remark found in recipes passed on from one cook to another rather than written as instruction for beginners.