a simple yarn

Funny the things that trigger childhood memories…

I’ve been dreaming about doughnuts, after encountering the luscious gems at Krispy Kreme in Birmingham. Brought to mind our family holidays to the beach in North Carolina. Getting up before the dawn…deposited in the car still clad in our pyjamas….pillows in hand for the eight-hour car ride…sleeping as long as we can to make time go by faster.

During the holiday was the obligatory purchase of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. Magically, our dad would appear with the glorious green and white box filled with the ultimate glazed fried-dough indulgence. Of course they’re made en masse but you’d think they were homemade…

I think the appeal of fresh, homemade doughnuts stems from early childhood reading, like this excerpt from ‘Farmer Boy’ by Laura Ingalls Wilder:

Mother was rolling out the golden dough, slashing it into long strips, rolling and doubling and twisting the strips. Her fingers flew; you could hardly see them. The strips seemed to twist themselves under her hands, and to leap into the big copper kettle of swirling hot fat. Plump! they went to the bottom, sending up bubbles. Then quickly they came popping up, to float and slowly swell, till they rolled themselves over, their pale golden backs going into the fat and their plump brown bellies rising out of it.

They rolled over, Mother said, because they were twisted. Some women made a new-fangled shape, round with a hole in the middle. But round doughnuts wouldn’t turn themselves over. Mother didn’t have time to waste turning doughnuts; it was quicker to twist them.

What a picture of harmonious familial bliss…

I’d like some of that…

Right, Sunday afternoon in our home. Dough is prepared. Heat the more modern organic rapeseed oil, as opposed to other old-fashioned fat. Plump, in they go! They swell and cook. But wait… They’re not transforming into the pale golden colour as ‘Mother’ experienced. Rather more like a dark-oak-nigh-unto-walnut-woodlike-substance. Oil too hot. Doughnuts are cooking faster than I can control.

Oops, ‘Mother’ is right, these new-fangled-round-shape-with-the-hole-in-the-middle don’t turn over and so it’s hard to keep up with the cooking-at-the-speed-of-light-doughnuts. Turn down heat. Now the doughnuts don’t cook nearly quick enough. I can imagine the copious amounts of oil that are being absorbed into the doughnuts as they slow-fry.

Well, I wouldn’t call it a glowing success…with certain rejection by the Krispy Kreme Doughnut police. So, the reality of making fresh, homemade doughnuts didn’t quite match the pre-conceived-Little-House-imagining of it. But after a good powdering of icing sugar…which covers a multitude of sins…the kids enthusiastically declared them better than Tim Horton’s, doughnut magnate of North America.

I wonder what, if anything, will trigger in my kids the childhood memory of fresh, homemade doughnuts on a Sunday afternoon. In the meantime, though, perhaps investing in a cooking thermometer is in order.