Divorce, Doughnuts, Grammy, and Me

In many ways, my Grammy Kittredge was an archetype of a grandmother. She kept a Victory Garden-sized vegetable patch in her yard that produced an abundance of beans and tomatoes every summer. She canned most of her garden haul and kept a chest freezer packed with home-rendered lard, Cool Whip, and hand-picked summer berries. In the evenings, she crocheted everything from baby blankets to Barbie doll clothes for her grandchildren.

But she wasn’t the simple, soft-hearted grandmother you might assume from her garden and crochet habits. She swore and had a short temper. Her driving was terrifying. And although it was a source of much nervousness for me, I had to stay with her for two weeks every summer between required visits with my dad. I lived with my single mom, my grandmother’s daughter, the rest of the year.

This was a season of my life bounded by cake donuts, a surprising bridge for me in a life suspended between divorced parents, and a window to my grandmother — a window we nearly shut when she died, and I thought the recipe had been lost forever.

Grammy Kittredge had five children, worked full-time in a furniture mill, and, like I said, was thrifty and skilled at pretty much every homemaking task. She was well known for many things — including her canned beans and homemade pickles — but the thing I remember most from my summers spent with her was her homemade cake doughnuts.

She’d make the dough the night before, and in the morning could be found standing over a hot cast iron skillet filled with what she referred to as “grease.” From that grease emerged the most beautifully burnished cake doughnuts, lightly sweetened and heavily spiced with nutmeg and cinnamon. Sometimes she tossed them with cinnamon sugar or powdered sugar (shaken in a brown paper bag), but we often ate them plain, warm from the fry oil, or split and toasted with a generous smear of butter the next day.

When I stayed with my grandmother between my required visits with my dad, she weirdly made a big fuss about making extra doughnuts — she’d stuff dozens into multiple freezer bags — to send with me for “Greg,” my dad. Even when her arthritis hindered her from making the donuts herself, she outsourced the recipe to a family friend, and we’d drive by and pick up the doughnuts en route to meet my dad. As a kid, I could not understand this rigamarole. I thought my grandmother loathed my dad — he had knocked up my mother their senior year of high school and gone on to be a lousy husband and father of two before my parents divorced — all facts my grandmother was happy to recite again at a moment’s notice.

“I think she was heartbroken about the whole thing,” my mom recently told me over a cup of coffee and a batch of these doughnuts. “She wasn’t very good at showing her emotions, but she probably didn’t want any of it — the divorce, you kids living without a dad — and the doughnuts were probably as much for her as they were for your dad.” Whatever feelings my grandmother had about my dad, my parents’ divorce, and us kids, she articulated them best through her cake doughnuts. And now I, as an adult, see that she was making sure I had comfort food at my dad’s house during those summers.

My grandmother died just a few years after her husband, and her children (including my mom) worked to dissolve their estate. Her cookbooks went off to children and grandchildren who lived closer than I did, and somewhere during that time, any clear records of her cake doughnut recipe went missing. When I became a mom myself, I desperately needed that recipe to share with my daughter — a bridge between my own history and my new little family’s. My mom had a few scrap papers with different ingredient amounts and notes collected over the years, so we tinkered with those, and I put out a call on Facebook tagging my aunts and cousins. We took more notes and tested them again.

The recipe below is the closest we’ve gotten — a crowd-sourced collection of steps and ingredients compiled with the best practices of my own professional training. My grandmother almost always made her dough the night before and you can, too, though they are just as good made the same day. The flour is added in two parts because you want a tender and somewhat sticky dough, and flours can vary in their hardiness.

Most of my mothers’ family agreed on the “grease.” These were likely fried in lard during their childhood, and shifted to shortening later on, but I personally fry these in peanut oil for ease and flavor. You can sub butter for the shortening in the batter, but the donuts will go stale more quickly — the shortening keeps them tender for days after frying, perfect for splitting, toasting, and eating with peanut butter — which is how my dad always served them to me during those awkward summer vacations, each doughnut disappearing one by one, until they were gone and it was time to go home again to my mother.