Home › Dainty Dishes › Doughnuts (Ingredients Two eggs one)
Doughnuts (Ingredients Two eggs one)
Ingredients: Two eggs, one and a half cupfuls of sugar, one cupful of sour milk, half a teaspoonful of soda, two tablespoonfuls butter or melted lard; add flour, making the dough rather soft. Fry them in hot lard and sprinkle pulverized sugar over them while still hot.
A plain sour-milk doughnut with almost no guidance on quantities — the flour is left entirely to the cook's judgment, which was normal in 1900. A few numbers make it workable.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic. Buttermilk is the closest stand-in cup for cup; failing that, a cup of milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes.
- SodaHalf a teaspoon to a full cup of sour milk is on the light side by modern reckoning, which usually pairs a cup of buttermilk with a rounded teaspoon. Expect a dense, cakey doughnut rather than a puffy one.
- Flour, unstated"Add flour, making the dough rather soft" works out to roughly 3 1/2 to 4 cups of all-purpose. Stop while the dough is still tacky and just barely handleable — extra flour is what makes these tough.
- Chill before rollingThe hinge of the recipe. A soft dough of this kind is far easier to cut and holds its shape in the fat if it rests covered in the refrigerator for an hour first. Roll about 1/3 inch thick.
- Frying fat and temperature"Hot lard" means 365-375F, checked with a thermometer. Below that the doughnuts drink fat; above it they brown before the centers set. Fry two or three minutes, turning once, and keep the fat at least three inches deep.
- Pulverized sugarConfectioners' or powdered sugar. Modern versions contain cornstarch, which is fine here. Sprinkle while the doughnuts are hot as directed, or the sugar will not cling.
- SeasoningThe recipe is unspiced. Nutmeg or cinnamon in the flour is common in doughnut recipes of the same era and is worth adding if you want the flavor most people associate with an old-fashioned doughnut.
- YieldAbout two dozen doughnuts plus holes, from a 3-inch cutter.
Sour milk was a working ingredient rather than a novelty in a household with a milk pan and no refrigeration: milk turned, and cooks used the acid it developed to raise cakes and doughnuts with a pinch of soda. Doughnuts themselves are generally traced in America to Dutch settlers' olykoeks — oil cakes — and by the late nineteenth century they were a standard cheap sweet fried in the same kettle of lard used for other work. The recipe's silence on flour quantity is typical of the era's cookbooks, which assumed a cook who knew what "rather soft" felt like under her hands.