January 8, 1951

Went to show tonite. “Sands of Iwo Jima,” with John Wanye, John Agar. Really good. Annette and Bob was there. Korean war is bad. Moma’s goining to sell doughnuts.

The  movie, “Sands of Iwo Jima”, was a film about WWII, which came out fairly soon after the war was over, kind of controversial at the time. It contains some actual footage from the war itself, and she’s right, it is a good movie — I recommend watching it, especially if you’re interested in that type of history.

At this time, the Korean War was going on. On this date, President Truman delivered his State of the Union address, in which he accuses the Soviets of waging “an evil war by proxy” in Korea. It was to continue for a couple more years.

However worrisome the war was, things still seemed OK on the home front — Mildred has decided to pick up some extra cash by selling her homemade doughnuts. She sold them through Baker’s Market. They must have hashed out this deal when the Baker’s were visiting the other night. My sister and I wondered what was so special about these doughnuts that so many people would want to buy them, so we looked up her recipe and decided to test it out for our ownselves. Here’s the famous recipe, and the story of what me and my sister went through while making our own batch. You can then decide for yourself what you think . . .

Potato Doughnuts

9 cups flour

1 cup milk

1 cup mashed potatoes

2 cakes Red Star yeast (we assumed modern-day “packets” of yeast equal a “cake” from back then, but decided if we do this again, we’ll use 3 packets, not just 2)

2 eggs

2/3 cup lard & butter (lard & butter mixed together to make 2/3 cup), melted

1 tsp. salt

1 cup sugar

1 cup potato water (reserved from boiling the potatoes for mashed)

As you can tell right from the get-go, you’ll have to make your mashed potatoes from scratch, cuz you need some of that water they were boiled in, so do that first. My sister did this part as I was driving from my house to hers, so she had ’em ready when I got there. She even remembered to save that water!

Sift the flour once. She used her antique flour sifter for this. I’ve mentioned before that I love this thing, and would love to find one like it.

Dissolve the yeast in a little bit of warm water. (We used 2 packets, but like I said above, we’ve decided that 3 would have been better.)

Scald the milk. We used a candy thermometer to do this, so we were sure we had it at the right temperature. I don’t know what temperature that is — our thermometer has a mark on it that says “Scald milk”, so we used that!

To the scalded milk, add the mashed potatoes, lard & butter mix, salt, and sugar. We didn’t melt our lard and butter, but we should have, so I added in above that you should do this, because it will mix in a lot better if it’s melted.

When this mixture is lukewarm, add two cups of the flour and the yeast. Mix well.

Add the well-beaten eggs, potato water, and the rest of the flour. When you have it all mixed up into dough, cover and let it raise. Here’s ours, fixin’ to raise for the first time.

When it’s double, punch it down, cover, and let it raise again. We were sure glad we started at 9:00 in the morning!

After this second raisin’, you can now roll it out and cut your doughnuts out of it. Then let ’em raise one more time. Here’s our cut doughnuts (and holes), raisin’ for the last time (thank goodness!).

Now you can deep-fry them in oil. Let me just state at this point, that it was getting real close to 5:00 pm when we started this part.We used my sister’s deep fryer, and did a few at a time. You have to turn them over and fry both sides.

This makes 6 1/2 dozen doughnuts. And it’s pretty much an all-day ordeal! We made a glaze from powdered sugar and milk and drizzled over the tops. Some we just rolled in sugar. We were so sick of them by the time we were done, we only ate one apiece, then Katy took the rest of them to work and fed them to her co-workers, who scarfed them down like wild beasts! 

Had I intended to quilt the day we made these, I wouldn’t have gotten much done, after the exhaustion of the whole ordeal, but since I’ve spelled it all out for you, you can be spared the hard labor, just buy your doughnuts already made, and get on with your quilting.