DOUGHNUTS

CRULLERS, FRIED-CAKES, variously shaped cakes of leavened, sweetened (and, commonly, spiced) dough, deep-fried in a pot or deep pan of lard or other fat or oil. By the most widely accepted usage, doughnuts are ° ring-shaped and crullers are not, being instead twisted or eurled. Fried-cakes may be of either or any other shape. There are, though, many to dispute these dicta. The three titles so frequently overlap in different parts of the country and by different formulas that it 1s impo ible to lay down an exact division that wouid he universally acceptable. The doughnut was originally a small eake, or lump, or ‘tnut’’ of dough thus cooked. Later, it was fashioned into a great variety of shapes—plain round (the present hole-le doughnut, or fried-cake), diamond-shaped, in rings, ete.—and of these the ring style in time gained predominance and is to-day the type most strongly fixed in popular favor, the a ociation of shape and title having been further advanced by the fame that followed the distribution of ‘‘doughnuts’’ by the Salvation Army la ies during the World War. The cruller (from the Dutch Arullen, ‘‘curled’’) was a similar piece of dough twisted or curled, or gashed cro wise, before cooking, and that still holds as the best description, though there are many you sands who know the cruller as a ring shaped cake—the ‘‘doughnut’’ of their compatriots! ‘*Fried-cake,’’ being a term which originated in the cooking of all styles of doughnut-eruller cakes, has been and is applied to all of them—to the ring, the solid round, and the twisted. <A good specific definition would confine it to the solid round—i.e., the doughnut without the hole. An objection to the title for either the solid round or any other shape is that to the uninitiated the term ‘‘fried-cake’’ generally suggests a sweet pancake, or similar product, fried in the common way—with a small quantity of fat in an ordinary frying-pan.