Crullers! It’s not going to shock anyone that the first recipe I tried out of my great-grandmother’s 1927 Butterick Book of Recipes would be a bread, a sweet, and fried in hot fat. That is my favorite kind of recipe. I don’t know if my great-grandmother made these crullers or not, but it’s fun to think she might have and that I followed the same directions she did. I doubt crullers have changed much in the past hundred years, but here is how they fried them on the prairie back in 1927.

How to make Crullers:

1/4 cup butter or shortening
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 cup milk
3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon salt
Flour

Cream the butter or shortening. Add sugar; then the well-beaten eggs. Stir the baking powder, nutmeg, and salt with one cup of flour and add alternately with the milk to the first mixture. Add additional flour to make a dough stiff enough to handle. (Note: For me, this took about four cups of flour total.)

Toss on floured board, roll one-half inch thick and cut into strips.

Twist and….

….fry in deep fat.

(These fry up fairly quickly so pay attention. Flip them if you’re not frying them in a really deep fryer and remove quickly to prevent overfrying.)

Drain on unglazed paper (what is that? wax paper? I drained them on a paper towel) and when cold roll in powdered sugar. (I just sprinkled them with regular sugar, while still warm, and ate them, while still warm. All of them. Okay, not really, but this required a lot of restraint.)

The only thing I think I’d do differently the next time I make them is slice the strips more narrowly. I think I made the strips too wide–they really “blow up” bigger when you fry them, to a surprising degree, so I should have started with narrower strips. Otherwise, these were sooo good and I totally felt like a prairie pioneer while I was stuffing my face with them. (More to come from this old cookbook! I want to try the tea cakes and the apple fritters and the beef tongue…. Okay, I’m kidding about that last one. Ewwwwww.)

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