Every year on December 31, Amsterdam baker Hartog puts up the barrier tapes and calls in crowd managers to manage the influx of people who come once a year especially for the locally famous oliebollen. Not much can go wrong, but it’s part of it. You can also bake at home. A tradition that in many families is accompanied by the same ritual nonsense every year: always the same mixing bowl, looking for the ice cream scoop tongs to drop the yeast batter into the deep fryer, always wearing the same apron. And of course always way too many oliebollen. Because there must be a full bowl on the table.
In the Netherlands, the oliebol is part of New Year’s Eve, just as gingerbread is part of Sinterklaas. But why? And has it always been that way?
Deep fryer or frying pan
First the definition of what an oliebol or oliekoek actually is. Karel Knip wrote in NRC It has already been said that the oliekoek was definitively called an oliebol when the deep fryer took over from the frying pan at the end of the nineteenth century. Culinary historian Lizet Kruyff starts with the oil cake and speaks of cakes fried in oil or lard (lard or rapeseed oil), with a distribution area from roughly Texel to the Marne in France. Roughly where the Low Countries ended, there is also the oliebollen border, or smoutebol, as it is called in Flemish. “You still see that, as far as Reims there are oliebollen stalls on the street, then it stops,” says Kruyff, who has a house on the Marne and lives there part of the year.
The first Dutch names for oliekoek come from the sixteenth century, as can be read on Wikipedia. The oil cake from the Vorsterman Bible (1528) is said to be a translation from Sephardic, for a fried currant roll that, according to Wiki, had “a ritual function”. The Sephardic Jews had brought that oil cake with currants from the Iberian Peninsula during the Inquisition.
That doesn’t mean that oil cakes weren’t baked here before. It was probably the Romans, says Kruyff, who brought a pastry with them to the Low Countries that can be seen as the mother of all oliebollen: the globi. Cato the Elder wrote in the second century BC about the balls of dough that were fried in stalls as street food. Kruyff: “If you lived in a city like Rome, you couldn’t just light a fire, that’s why street stalls were created.” Beignets, churros, donuts and oliebollen are all descendants of those Roman globi.
Lots of spices
In the Dordrechts Museum there is a painting by Albert Cuyp from 1652 of a woman with an earthenware pot full of oliebollen. That radiates something very everyday. At that time, a lot of spices were still used: cinnamon, ginger and ‘weynigh nails’, according to the cookbook The sensible cook or careful landlady. But that wasn’t elitist either. All dishes were much spicier then.
Oliebollen were already fair food, but as a New Year’s Eve snack they are a more recent phenomenon. Kruyff: “In the mid-nineteenth century, Christmas in Germany became not only a religious celebration but also a domestic celebration. Trendsetters were Queen Victoria and her German husband Albert.” The Dutch took over, with all the confectionery that entailed. “And as it goes, you attach New Year’s Eve to it. If you went out into the street at twelve o’clock to exchange New Year’s wishes, you asked the neighbors for an oliebol.” A ritual to ensure a prosperous New Year? Just as the Sephardic oliebol possibly also had a ritual function? Kruyff doesn’t see it that way. “If we don’t understand something, we quickly call it a ritual. Pleasant bourgeois silliness, that’s what it’s all about. And such a fatty bite dampens the alcohol more than fantastically.”