Oliebollen (Dutch New Year's Doughnuts)

On the last day of December, Dutch streets fill with the smell of hot oil. Oliebollen (literally "oil balls") are the fried close of the year, sold from kraampjes on every corner and made in home kitchens where the windows fog with steam. You eat them standing up, sugar on your gloves, waiting for midnight and the fireworks.

An old, plain magic

The lineage is genuinely old. Fried dough studded with dried fruit appears in Dutch cookery well back into the seventeenth century, when a version called oliekoecken was recorded in the very first Dutch cookbooks of the Golden Age. Those early oil-cakes were richer and more heavily spiced, but the shape and the method are recognisably the ancestor of what the country still fries today: spoonfuls of yeasted, fruited dough dropped into hot fat.

The two-spoon method

There is no special equipment, only technique. The dough is deliberately wet, closer to a thick batter, and the trick is to shape it with two spoons dipped in the frying oil so the sticky mass slides free into rough, tumbling balls. They turn themselves as they cook if the oil is deep enough, browning into craggy spheres.

Oliebollen are the taste of the turning year, eaten warm and dusted white against the cold.

Everything depends on the oil temperature. Get it right and the crust is crisp and deep gold while the inside stays tender and studded with soft raisins and apple. Serve them barely cooled, snowed under with icing sugar, and save a few for the neighbours who inevitably follow the smell to your door.