There isn't one of us who doesn't enjoy a good donut now and then.
Question is did they have Donuts 300 years ago did they enjoy the
wonderful round goodness with sprinkles? It's hard to imagine that they did.
So let's dig in and see if we can find out just what they had that we could call
a donut now when I start to think about this I think confectionery sweetness that
sounds expensive maybe if they had Donuts that was something that rich people would enjoy.
But if we go digging into the books especially right there in the 18th century we find William
Ellis's book that's all about taking care of the farm the simple farm in England in 1750.
They had a lot of Farm Workers people that were working hard in the field and he talks about
feeding those farmers and we find out that they do have something almost exactly like
a doughnut in fact several different things. There's a family of food traditions in England
and in fact all over Europe and maybe all over the world they would call them something like
fritters or maybe even just cakes. The word donut doesn't appear at all
if we go digging donut kind of combined as a word doesn't really show up until
about 1805 1804 something like that. We do see it show up in a dictionary
in 1806 and it says a small roundish cake. In fact classically what we call a donut
hole is more one what the true definition of a donut would be a dough and a nut-shaped and we
can even see food sometimes related to that if we look earlier we find gingerbread and
they called them sometimes Ginger nuts 'cause they would make them into a walnut sized piece.
The 17th and 18th century French cookbooks have recipes for beignets just like we know
them and these were popular for religious holidays and religious holidays are like
street carnivals and and fairs of the time period they are frequented by everyone all
the common folks and they are enjoying Donuts. 200 years ago there was more than one way to get
to something like a donut even if that's not what they necessarily called it they
would make a Fritter and there are lots of different Fritter recipes Fritter recipes
usually have some kind of fruit in them and yeah sometimes today we put fruit in our Donuts right.
Fritters are really close to donut except the dough is very loose it's a batter and we pour
a batter into the hot oil and it makes our Fritter and a donut usually that's a very soft
dough something that we can cut into a shape like a doughnut hole shape so it doesn't seem
to matter whether our donut ends up like a little doughnut hole or a big funnel cake it's basically
the same thing and there are so many different recipes in our time period for just exactly that.
The first recipe I want to do is for fritters and this this recipe comes from William Ellis's
country housewife family companion in 1750 the Hertfordshire plain Fritter to make these our
housewife makes use of six eggs well beaten and mixed with two quarts of milk a quart of
flour a good store of powdered Ginger because Ginger makes the fritters hollow and hot she
also mixes some coarse sugar with her batter by which these need little or no sugar afterwards
to eat them with batter fries hollower in fritters than in pancakes but then it
employs more time and fat in dressing them. This recipe is so simple there are very few
ingredients let's start mixing our eggs with our milk we're going to whisk up our eggs first and
then as soon as they're whisked up we're going to mix up our milk and remember I'm only going
to make a quarter of this batch because it makes a lot of batter so we're going to mix
up these eggs with the milk and as soon as those are mixed up I'm going to going to mix
up the dry ingredients separately so we've got our flour we've got our ginger which is going
to make that wonderful spicy flavor and then some sugar once we have our wet ingredients done and
our dry ingredients now we can combine those together and whisk it until it's got a little
bit of air in it once our batter is finished we can pour it into our hot lard to cook these up.
The first time we see the term donut in American literature is in 1809 when Washington Irving
writes about a dinner and it's got all these rich foods and it's covered with donuts and that he
describes is almost exactly what we're talking about here he refers to it of course connected
with the German ancestry of that area and they're called something like oie koken in the German.
Our fritters turned out great we put them in that hot oil and when they start to float and
turn a nice light brown they're ready to come out. The next recipe comes out of the same book and it
gets a lot closer to Donuts this one's called how to make these Hertfordshire cakes nuts or
pin cushions as it says these are much used in Hertfordshire for giving Farmers servants
a changeable dinner now and then to their satisfaction for if they are made as they
should be the men are generally fond of them we take skimmed milk and Hogs lard and warm them by
the fire then some flour sugar ye East an egg or two and the powder of Jamaica spice we make these
into a paste as if for a pie crust we roll it out to the thinness of 1/4 of an inch and cut it into
2 in squares then we boil them in Hogs lard in a little Kettle or a stew pan or frying pan first
thing we need to do is get our milk warming and then we can melt the lard into that we don't want
it to be hot we just want it to be liquefied this is a classic 18th century recipe in that there are
no amounts given we just have to fake our way to it we know that we get to a consistency of
something like a pie crust or a very soft dough so that we can cut it into our shapes so our only
real measurement are the eggs we're going to be just working with two eggs I'll take our liquid
ingredients and mix them all together along with our yeast that's a liquid ingredient from the
time period and then add in our flour until we get to that consistency that we're looking for.
It's fascinating as we read into William Ellis that these aren't necessarily for
breakfast or even necessarily as a snack but they might be dinner they might be the
main course of dinner and obviously they had a different idea of dinner than we do today.
So donuts don't always show up as a sugary treat or some kind of snack no
they also show up as a garnish sometimes a savory garnish in dishes like peas or
spinach or even one with an open face fish pie. Several of these recipes push these Donuts up
one more notch by adding a pudding sauce and then sprinkling sugar on them and a classic
pudding sauce here is 1/3 wine 1/3 butter and 1/3 sugar we have two versions of the working
man's donut the Fritter here and obviously doesn't look anything like a doughnut today
but even today in a doughnut shop you can buy a Fritter and this Fritter you know there's a lot
of ginger in here and Ginger is a working man's spice this is one of the least expensive spices
and the biggest pop of flavor so this is going to have a lot of gingery flavor and should be great
It's got that great elephant ear texture we didn't even have to bother to sprinkle sugar
on this there's enough in the dough to give us the sweetness and a great Ginger pop on these
the recipe says that it brings hollowness to this and also heat and that Ginger is a kind of a hot
spice and it it really does a great job in here. Now the one that's closest to the classic donut
these are what we would call doughnut holes and boy they've got a lot of wonderful sauce over the
top of these and the sugariness should be great and the spice in this is all spice they call it
Jamaica pepper in the time frame but that's a classic all spice and again a very inexpensive
spice so classic working man's donut. All spice in here is treated like the
poor man's nutmeg it is used quite often and let's find out how it works out in this.
Well pudding sauce over the top we've got some nice Airy Pockets with this
the yeast had enough time to really build up once it hits that hot oil really starts
to puff up these worked out great. Texture compared to a modern doughnut
actually a little more dense but very flavorful you're going to love these!