Spice Doughnuts

On snowy days, my father always tells the same story. He is a small boy, awake early on a very cold morning in the depths of January. It is the late 1940's. His Irish grandmother is in the kitchen, looking out the window at the snow sifting down from the still dark sky.

"No school for you today, laddie" she tells him.

This tall, iron gray woman, a daughter of famine, quite literally--her family had only survived the Great Hunger because they had been cook and gamekeeper on an Anglo-Irish estate "by the grace of God" as she put it, while more than 1 million people starved--set to work making breakfast for my father and his five siblings.

My father had oatmeal every morning of his life--made by his grandmother, and if he didn't eat every bite, she bopped him on the head with the serving spoon.

She was a very firm woman.

But this morning, when my father was still the only child awake, and it was just the two of them, grandmother and grandchild in the cold kitchen before the stove had a chance to chase the chill from the linoleum, my great-grandmother made my father a treat--these spicy doughnuts. Fried dough, she'd called them then, and recalled for him a time when she herself had helped her mother make them on a rare snowy Irish morning, in an enormous Victorian kitchen, at a range that burned bricks of peat in a country an ocean away, in another century.

Of course this is not that recipe. But on a recent snow day, I missed my family. And so my children and I made these, and I thought about my Dad, and his grandmother, and her mother.

Love, comfort, snow.

Recipe:

• 1 1/2 cups  all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon fresh grated nutmeg
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon allspice
• 1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup buttermilk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1 large egg
• vegetable oil for frying
• cinnamon sugar or confectioner's sugar for dusting

Special Equipment: heavy skillet for frying, thermometer

1. In a medium bowl, stir dry ingredients together. 
2. In a smaller bowl, whisk buttermilk, egg, vanilla and oil together, and then whisk into the dry ingredients. Stir just until combined. 
3. Fill skillet with oil to a depth of 1/2 inch and heat over medium heat until thermometer registers 375 degrees. 
4. Drop SMALL, rounded spoonfuls of dough into the hot oil CAREFULLY. The dough will puff as it cooks, so think less than a teaspoon. As they cook, they will usually turn themselves over, but sometimes they may need a little helping hand with a slotted spoon. Remove when they are lightly golden brown and puffy and drain on paper towels.
5. Dust with cinnamon sugar or confectioner's sugar while still warm.