Tweet01-01-2010 om 15:52 by Sueli Brodin

We were enjoying my mother in law’s elaborate Christmas dinner last week when my daughter Naomi suddenly exclaimed: “I’m so much longing for New Year’s Eve! Mama will make oliebollen and we’ll get to stay up late until midnight!”

Turning to me, she added teasingly: “But they’ll have to be better this time Mama, not still raw inside like last year!”

My facetious brother in law burst out laughing and started poking fun as usual at my well known failures at cooking Dutch culinary specialties: they never seem to quite look or taste the way they are supposed to.

At least my daughter’s remark solved the dilemma I was having in deciding how to celebrate New Year’s Eve: should I give it a Japanese, Brazilian or French flavour? Should I serve homemade sushi, bolinhos de bacalhau or caviar?

No, this year again, my children wanted to do as the Dutch and eat oliebollen. These are deep-fried round shaped doughnuts, with or without raisins, and sprinkled with powdered sugar, which are traditionally eaten on New Year’s Eve.



I remember my surprise the first time I understood the word oliebollen, which literally means “oilballs”. “How unappetizing!” I thought. After living a few years in the Netherlands however, I realised that it was yet another example of the straightforward, no-beating-around-the-bush kind of words that are very common in the Dutch language, such as woordenboek (“book of words”) for dictionary, or stinkdier (“smelly animal”) for skunk. After all, oliebollen are balls of dough fried in oil, aren’t they? And their unhealthy sounding name doesn’t seem to prevent anyone from indulging them.

My sister in law kindly gave me some tips: “Don’t worry Sueli, just buy an instant oliebollenmix packet at the supermarket and follow the instructions, they’re very reliable. Make sure that the oil is at the right temperature, not too hot, otherwise your oliebollen will only fry on the outside and stay raw inside. And use two spoons and dip them first into the hot oil. You’ll see, it’s really very easy.”

I didn’t tell her that the problems with her advice were that I’m usually not very keen on using instant packets - I prefer cooking from scratch, with original ingredients – and that I also suffer from a stubborn streak of seldom following recipe instructions and almost always alter them.

But not wanting to run the risk of disappointing my children two years in a row, I did buy an oliebollenmix packet earlier this week and carefully followed the instructions yesterday morning when I started preparing the dough. This was a very easy job indeed because I just needed to add water to the contents of the packet and mix them together. My only act of insubordination was to leave the dough to rise during the whole afternoon instead of just the one hour that was written on the packet.

By the evening, the dough had tripled in volume and looked and smelled perfect. My husband and children were excited as I started frying the oliebollen.



I have no idea what I did last year to so miserably fail my first attempt at making oliebollen because everything went so smoothly this time. My sister in law’s two-spoon trick worked very well and my daughter Naomi smiled approvingly as I placed a large plate of beautiful round-shaped and golden-coloured oliebollen on the living room table.



My husband sprinkled them with powdered sugar and tasted one: “Mmm, delicious!” This was the sign for my children that the doughnuts were really fine this time and that they could safely go ahead and start feasting.

As I’m writing this, my husband is on the phone with his mother and I can hear him reporting the good news: “Oh yes, they were very nice, very knapperig (“crispy”)…”

Another successful milestone for me I guess… and next year, perhaps I’ll try to make the oliebollen dough from scratch…



Or make waffles instead, because as I fortuitously learned two days ago from a good Limburg friend, “the true New Year tradition in this region is to eat waffles, not oliebollen, absolutely not!”

“Oliebollen are an influence from the north,” he said.

Best wishes for a happy and healthy New Year!

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