Integration Tip

A friend gets the credit for planting the notion of "The International Grease and Starch Cookbook" in my brain. She was referring to the fact that everywhere you go, there's a favorite way of serving puffy, deep-fried flour: doughnuts, Indian fry bread, Latin American Buñuelos, Spanish Churros, Chinese You Tiao, and the list goes on and on.
I was once served the Corsican variant, to my surprise, by a fierce French-food-fundamentalist and health-oriented French Corsican who proudly introduced me to this tasty, oil-soaked treat. In the steamy Caribbean-rim zone, I watched traders from French Guyana disembark from ferries and water-taxi's on the Surinamese side of the river with bottles of European wine and trays of locally-fried German jelly doughnuts or "Berliner Bollen," as they are known in the former Dutch colony.
Simplify the Berliner Bollen recipe just a bit and you've got the basics for Dutch "Oliebollen" or "Oil Balls." With or without currants or raisins, the dough is plunged into boiling oil and dusted with powdered sugar. The scent from this operation is in the Dutch air from mid-Autumn throughout the Winter, whether or not the temperature drops. Next to tram-stops, on bridges, at intersections - anywhere there is a free rectangle of space, the cheery frying stalls on wheels, most with old-fashioned facades, take position.
I had consumed many oliebollen in my early years in the Netherlands before the moment arrived when I decided to produce a homemade batch, and I set out on the oil ball mission with confidence. Inside the supermarket, bent over the baking supplies, I found myself surrounded by smiling shoppers. I asked them for advice. These women were so nice, so responsive to my inquiry in accented Dutch. One woman reached into her handbag and found an envelope which she used to write down the oil ball ingredients: flour, milk, yeast, currants. She added that I could buy apples to produce the deep-fried beignets that are also part of the traditional New Year's Eve party menu. She even wrote it down in two columns, detailing amounts needed for smaller or larger efforts.
The sense of shopping urgency fell away and three or four of us continued the conversation. The experienced Oil Ball bakers traded tips. Just before a silence could fall at the end of their sentences I would insert another question to keep things going: does it matter whether you use currants or raisins? What's the best kind of oil to fry in? Are oil balls the same all over the country, or are their regional differences? I did want answers, but mostly, I just wanted to share their enthusiasm. The envelope meant a lot to me, and I saved it.
I had used shopping as a ruse in the past, as a new arrival, when I began learning the language. Standing next to Dutch shoppers in action on street markets, I listened to their requests and ordered exactly the same, repeating their words as well as possible. Shopping bags yielded remarkable results.