Doughnuts - a Civil War era recipe

[Music] welcome to civil war digital digest i'm will we're at the waterloo farm museum in their cabin and we're going to bring you another food recipe from the civil war era and this one's exciting because it's really from the civil war era it's donuts we found this recipe in the sanitary fair cookbook from bangor maine 1864. i have a reprint that was done during the 150s or the sesquicentennial of the civil war as a fundraiser for the museum the original copy that comes in here was sent anonymously to the museum in 1967 was 99 hand-written recipes and when you talk about recipes during the civil war you sometimes see a recipe book written how you might pronounce a receipt book today and sometimes they're hand written what it is is people find their favorite recipes and they write them down not necessarily just the cook books that we buy like the kentucky housewife or katherine beecher's books in this case the book was assembled as part of a fundraiser for a sanitary commission fair that was held in december 1864 to raise money for soldiers in the union army to support them in the other efforts of the united states sanitary commission the town had a big festival several of the ladies got together for this fair and created a cookbook we don't know whether these were recipes that were made for the fair or whether they were recipes put together as a book in the book sold like this was during the 150th anniversary as a fundraiser we're not quite sure on that but still these recipes were all collected then the thing i really like about this cookbook is the way you can connect with history with it on the left side of most pages is an image of the original handwriting and then on the right there's two things at the top there's a typewritten transcription of what's actually in the text and in the bottom they modernize it for those of you who may want to do it at home it's a fantastic way to connect with history as we do donuts today we'll just go ahead and use the period recipe it reads 1 cup sugar 2 3 cup of milk 1 egg 2 teaspoons of melted butter 1 teaspoon cream of tartar half of soda to be mixed as thin this can be easily rolled to the fat to be very hot before dropping in instead of the two tablespoons of butter we'll use two tablespoons of melted lard we're going to work first with our dry ingredients and our wet ingredients and then we'll combine the two roll them out cut them up and then we'll start the frying i've already got the flour the tartar and the soda mixed together i'm gonna add the sugar the recipe says to sift this i don't have it what we're looking to do is to get any big chunks broken up and to get it combined as best as possible we'll go ahead and do that with a fork today all right our friends at history acres have provided us with an egg in the lard let's go ahead crack the egg into the lard get that mixed up add two-thirds of a cup of milk and that's all the wet ingredients we'll get those combined and then we'll go ahead and combine the wet and dry and now with the dry ingredients combined in one bowl and the wet in another it's time to combine the two and build the dough that's going to become our donuts from experience i found that we don't want to dump this in all at once work a little bit of the wet into the dry get it mixed in and then add some more this dough will get very sticky on your way to ready and the big thing is just to get all the flour combined and let it soak up as much of the wet ingredients there will be a time i found in making this a couple of times that it just feels like it gets too wet sometimes i add a little bit of extra flour but once i over did it and then suddenly it was way too dry this flower becomes really sticky really sticky and then it sort of is ready to go we found is rolling it out about a half an inch thick cutting it into whatever you want to shape it squares or balls i've just done squares because that keeps the surface area and i can flip because i'm not doing that deep of a grease and i'm not wasting the lard that i do have on the farm is a way that we can work so we'll go ahead flour our work surface and roll this out okay so this doe's got a little bit of stick still to it especially with the period rolling pin but even of the modern rolling pin one good trick here let's just get a little flower on the pin or on the top to go ahead and make it so it doesn't stick as bad all right well our dough is laid out the next thing i'm going to do based on how thick it is again i found that i want these donut nuggets to be even as much as i can we'll get a better bake so i'm looking at the thickness and i'm just going to slice them up i'll keep working on this for a little bit we'll get this done and then we'll get the grease heated up and let's get frying because let's face it donuts let's fry them in lard okay so we're by the fire we've taken a trivet on the hearth and we've gone ahead and put some coals out put lard that we preserved off the farm into the cast iron pan and the earth is now a place that we're going to cook on the lard has gotten nice and hot so let's go ahead and say this nice and hot you will burn yourself if you are not careful here whether you're doing it in a 19th century situation with lard or whether you try this at home in a 21st century situation either with lard that you can get or canola oil be careful i have the fork with me because i'm not just going to go willy-nilly dumping the donuts in there i'm going to put them in carefully i've only got a little bit of lard in there so that i'll flip these halfway through and we're going to go ahead and get them started [Music] you can see right away as you put them in the frying starts to take over you see the bubbles around the donuts now i'm not only being careful of the frying pan and the fire now that my fork has been in there several times i'm being very careful of the edge of it all right so there's nothing in the banger maine sanitary commission book about how long to fry these it's a to look to feel thing we're going to look to get to a golden brown obviously since they're sticking up out of the grease a little bit we're going to have to flip them at least once to do the other side we'll just turn them and watch them until they're done let's keep an eye on it for a little bit one caution i'll give you if you choose to make donuts the way we are and putting a low layer of oil in a cast iron pan whether you do it on a fire or especially if you do this on a modern gas range be careful the heat will continue to keep in the cast iron and that temperature could sneak up on you and your cooking time could speed up and speed up and speed up the further you go and the more they get so you just have to manage that and keep an eye on it let's go ahead and turn them and see how they're doing all right so we've got most of the donuts turned here i'm just going to take this one and turn it one more time we see the brown is starting to come and we're just watching to see when it's done keep an eye on it be attentive to it and we'll pull them out in just a little bit so definitely when cooking by a fire or on a hearth here and somewhat in a modern kitchen you'll notice that your pan cooks at different temperatures in different places so we look here in the middle and we can see that these are really lovely and nice i'm going to be very careful a little bit of the extra fat drip out but when i turn this over onto my cloth we can see that it's nice and done on all sides the one next to it is but i've been noticing that stuff over on this edge of the pan where the coals aren't quite as far out are not cooking as fast so since this is done i don't want it to burn let's get it off and let's slide the ones that aren't going as quickly into the middle where they can get the extra heat i'm going to take a second and let some of that large drain off well okay we've got some of the donuts ready to fry but you've seen the donuts fry and man let's go ahead and first start by trying these completely delicious the bread the sweet of the sugar the milk that's in there everything came together lovely then fried and lard will you fly it fry anything in lard or maybe bacon grease good grief this is delicious but it's heavy and it's cakey on our farm this is a treat so let's take our treat to the next level we're going to go outside the cookbook that this came in and here's what we're going to do we're going to take these and roll them in sugar and we're not going for any fancy sugar by 21st century standards but a white sugar is not the most common thing and we read different accounts things were sometimes kept as special so that's going to take this and it's going to kick the special of this up a little bit by using the best sugar that's in the house well this is delicious you take that fried cake roll it in sugar and it's just a beautiful treat here on the civil war farm and it's a treat you can have at your home too take a chance take a look at this cookbook it supports a historic charity it's something that was a surprise that came to them anonymously it's a great piece of history find your own connection to history and we'll see you down the road at civil war digital digest

Channel: Civil War Digital Digest

Views: 5,342

Keywords: civil war digital digest, CWDD, civil war recipe, dighist, digital history, history, digital historian, education, research, connection, civil war, maine, lard, log cabin, cook with lard, cooking with lard, real ingredients, historical cooking, history acres, farm, pig fat, homemade, dough, doughnuts, donuts, time to make the donuts, fried food, fry, deep fry, sugar, pastry, recipe, civil war history, Taste history, donut recipe, educational videos, history documentary, Doughnut recipe

Id: jada6OjdlA0

Length: 11min 37sec (697 seconds)

Published: Wed May 11 2022