Grandma’s “Every-Day Cook-Book” #6: DROP FRIED CAKES

(Smith-Post)

Google “Old-Fashioned Drop Fried Cakes” and, like me, you will likely only find recipes for deep-fried donuts or fritters. Even grandma’s “Every-Day Cook-Book” features a short recipe on page 192 for fried cakes, aka donuts:

“FRIED CAKES. One cup of sugar, two eggs, half a cup of shortening, one teaspoon of soda, one cup of sour-milk, cut in rings; have your lard very hot, in which place a peeled potato to keep lard from burning, and drop in your cakes; they will come to the top of lard when light; fry a dark brown; when taken out sprinkle sugar over them.”

Let me first say, I am a once-in-a-blue-moon “from scratch” baker so I find that the recipes from this practical 1892 recipe book appear to have been written under the assumption that the user already knew her way around the kitchen. I make no such claim. However, even my limited expertise suggests that there might be a critical ingredient missing from the recipe above. What do you think?

I only ask that because, slipped between pages 36 and 37, is a single sheet of ruled stationery upon which is recorded two recipes for “Drop Fried Cakes”—one using applesauce and the other using sweet milk or cream.

The hand-written lists of ingredients are very similar to those listed for Miss E. Neil’s fried cakes except that they, unlike hers, include a goodly amount of flour to combine with the sugar, eggs, baking soda and milk in order to form a thick batter. I’m pretty sure that, had I dutifully followed the book’s original recipe, I would have found it impossible to “cut in rings” the gooey mixture as directed.

So I’m glad I found the inserted recipe sheet, even though it was also written with the assumption that the reader would know what she was doing over a dangerously hot pot of lard, with or without a peeled potato. For example, the hand-written recipe that begins mid-page simply provides the final steps:

“Flour salt + seasoning

Stir thick enough so the spoon will stand up and

drop in hot lard” 

(Okay. I almost put “lard” on my shopping list. Instead, I wrote “donut holes.”)

NOTE: If you look closely at the lettering, you’ll notice that the person who copied the recipe shown above was also the author of the recipe for “Plum Pudding” written on the back of the book’s brittle title page. I’d like to think that my great-grandmother Emma (Emerine) Smith recorded them both as her small home-made contributions to future generations.