Once upon a time, I think I must have had a bad doughnut experience in Blackpool, as the smell of them frying still triggers a negative, nauseous response. That, or I realised that doughnuts are basically balls of deep-fried sweetened bread dough filled with oozing jam and smothered in crunchy sugar, and it had the same effect. For me, a pan full of hot oil whether in a shop or a home (most houses had a chip pan where I grew up) was for making wonderfully fresh chips to go with eggs, fish fingers, and fried eggs, and not for sweet stuff.
Despite my love of home-made chips, I've never had access to a chip pan since I left home, and have never really wanted a deep-fat fryer of my own. I haven't missed one, either, except when I was making onion bhajis last Christmas - and then again this last weekend, when we decided to make doughnuts after years of talking about making them.
The teenagers thought I was mad issuing all the warnings about hot oil and spontaneous combustion etc, but as they've not grown up with a chip-pan on the stove, I felt they might have missed something out of their kitchen education. As with anything mildly dangerous, they clamoured to help, testing the temperature by dropping in little cubes of bread and watching them sizzle and turn brown, standing over the doughnuts as they bobbed up, puffed up, and turned brown, tossing them in caster sugar, and injecting them with jam (the jammy doughnuts ended up looking as though they'd sustained flesh wounds and were bleeding jam).
The smell of the doughnuts frying reminded them all of Legoland (so much more upmarket than Blackpool Pleasure Beach) and although it had a predictably Proustian effect on me and brought back the usual feeling of nausea, the taste and texture were a revelation to someone who has lumped all doughnuts in the same Krispy Kreme/supermarket bracket. While I may never be able to eat a whole one unless it was very small (next time we fancy making mini doughnuts), I was amazed at just how delicious a bite of a fresh, home-made doughnut can be. A doughnut definitely needs raspberry jam in the centre, and a light coating of caster sugar, but it is the rich, soft, lightly sweetened and ultra-fresh breadiness that is the best part.
After this happy experience with a pan of oil, I can only hope that in the future the smell of doughnuts frying will bring back good memories of cooking with teenagers rather than bad memories of a tummy-turning experience on the promenade.
