Doughnuts - American Recipe

Doughnuts

🌍 American, American Home Cooking Difficulty: ●●○○○

🍳 Equipment: Bowl, Tablespoon, Small saucepan, Sifter, Dover beater, Deep iron kettle, Bread-board, Rolling-pin, Doughnut-cutter, Long-handled fork, Colander with paper

Classic American doughnuts — simple, satisfying home baking.

Ingredients

• 2 cups flour
• 2½ teaspoons baking-powder
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 1 egg
• ½ cup powdered sugar
• 1½ tablespoons butter
• ¼ teaspoon cinnamon
• ½ cup milk
• 2 or 3 pounds lard or similar fat

Method

1. Beat — the egg in a bowl, add the sugar, and beat again.
2. Melt — the butter in a small saucepan, add it with the cinnamon to the egg and sugar, and stir well.
3. Sift — the flour, baking-powder, and salt together, and add with the milk, alternately and a little at a time, to the mixture in the bowl, stirring constantly.
4. Set — the bowl in the ice-box for an hour or more.
5. When — ready to fry the doughnuts, put the fat in the kettle and set it over the fire.
6. Sprinkle — the bread-board and rolling-pin with flour, place half the dough on the board, and roll it out into a sheet about ¼ inch thick.
7. Dip — the doughnut-cutter in flour, and cut out the doughnuts from the sheet of dough.
8. Take — the remaining dough from the mixing-bowl, and repeat the operation. The scraps of dough left on the board should be worked together, rolled out, and cut.
9. Put — three or four doughnuts at a time into the hot fat in the kettle, turning them with a long-handled fork so that they will brown evenly. It should take from three to five minutes to cook them.
10. Lift — the doughnuts from the fat as they are cooked, putting them on soft crumpled paper in the colander.

Tags: milk, butter, egg, flour, sugar · Source: The Plain Sailing Cook Book (1922)

Notes

The temperature of the fat is an important matter. It should be hot enough so that the doughnuts will rise quickly from the bottom of the kettle immediately after they are put into the fat. The heat must be at once reduced if the fat begins to smoke. The doughnuts may be coated with powdered sugar after frying by putting them one at a time in a small paper bag containing 3 or 4 tablespoons of sugar, and shaking the bag once or twice. The fat in which the doughnuts have fried should be strained into a bowl, and kept for the same use later.