Elizabeth Staats (1852-1933, Kent County) collected recipes – hundreds of them.
The collection started with a scrapbook Staats inherited from her mother Mary Griffith (1829-1892), whose original book contains handwritten recipes for food as well as things like soap and a “cure for cholera.” Staats finished that book before compiling the second book of over 300 recipes. (The two books are now housed at the Maryland Historical Society.) She was partial to cakes and desserts, although she occasionally clipped recipes for things like “Cheese Fondu”, scrapple, or deviled crabs. Many of the recipes are crossed out, “no good” written beside them, or with newer scraps pasted right over the old handwritten recipes.
There’s a social register’s worth of sweets: “Fannie Goodall’s” Chocolate Cake; “Alice Drekas’” Boiled Icing; “Laura Townsend’s” Crullers.
But Staats didn’t just rely on her extended personal network for recipe ideas – she had access to newspapers and multiple magazines like “The Country Gentleman,” “Ladies’ Home Journal,” and “Good Housekeeping.”
Good Housekeeping Volume 35, 1902
This recipe for “Unsurpassed Doughnuts” came from the latter. Good Housekeeping was founded in 1885 by publisher Clark W. Bryan with a mission to “perpetuate perfection as may be obtained in the household.” The new magazine combined that movement towards “domestic science” with fiction, poetry, and even some puzzles.
Paging through Staats’ scrapbooks, I could easily envision a woman spending leisurely afternoons poring over the magazine, clipping out good things she would like to eat.
Rebus, Good Housekeeping Volume 35, 1902
Below her transcription of the doughnut recipe, Staats wrote “”Fine. Used this winter 1903.” Unlike so many others in the scrapbooks, this recipe has been tried – and approved. It had been submitted to Good Housekeeping my a Mrs. N.W. (Charlotte) Northrup, of Grand Rapids MI.
As is so often the case, the yeast component is basically unknowable. Its hard to understand how a recipe could even have meaning with such a huge variable. Nevertheless, I used a few teaspoons of dry yeast, and set the ingredients out to ferment overnight as instructed.
I made these doughnuts on the day of the Mayor’s Annual Christmas Parade. We cooked them up in my cousins’ Medfield kitchen and shared them with neighbors. They were pretty great. So was the parade, as usual.
Recipe:
“1 cup sugar, 3 cups milk, 1 cup yeast, make these into a sponge and let stand overnight; in the morning add 1 cup sugar, ½ cup butter, 3 eggs, ½ nutmeg, ½ tea-spoon soda, stir in flour until stiff.Let rise again, then mix stiff enough to roll, and cut into shape desired. Let rise again until light, then fry.Fine. Used this winter 1903To save grease in frying doughnuts; put ½ teaspoonfull of ginger in grease when hot.”
Recipe from Maryland Historical Society MS 1765, “Mary Black Griffith Cookbook”, via Good Gousekeeping Volume 35, 1902
Interpretation, as I recall it:
- 2 Cups sugar
- 3 Cups milk (room temperature)
- 4.5 teaspoons dry yeast
- .5 Cup butter, soft
- .5 tsp salt
- 3 eggs
- .5 tsp nutmeg
- .5 Teaspoons baking soda
- flour (6-8 cups)
Combine 1 cup of sugar with the milk and yeast; let stand over night. In the morning add the other cup of sugar, then beat in eggs one by one. Beat in butter plus the other ingredients. Gradually add flour until dough starts to become smooth and form a ball that pulls away from the sides of mixer or bowl. Knead for about a minute then leave to rise for about 2 hours.
Beat down and roll to about ½” thickness, cut into desired shapes and let rise another 1-2 hours – until puffing up.
Fry in hot vegetable oil until golden brown – about 1-2 minutes each side.
Roll in sugar mixed with cinnamon and nutmeg. Accept compliments graciously.
