Home from Oz

All of my chickadees are under one roof again. Two flew away for summer camp and a business trip, and to celebrate their homecoming I made the long awaited Crullers for breakfast.

Crullers are a forgotten standby of American farm life. When I first happened across the recipe in Lucie’s collection, it didn’t exactly jump out at me. But then I watched the Wizard of Oz.

In the beginning of the movie after the farmhands help Dorothy out of the pigpen, Auntie Em enters the scene with a plate of what looks like biscuits. But she calls them something else:

"Here, can't work on an empty stomach. Have some crullers. Just fried."

Which then meant that my family had to wait while I replayed the line five times to make sure I heard her right. What are the chances:  a fictional Midwestern farm wife with Crullers in a movie set in 1939, and an actual 1930’s Midwestern farm wife with a recipe for Crullers? This was a thing worth looking into.

Everywhere today, a Cruller is described as a fried doughnut with ridges and a hole in the middle. Recipes call for a thin batter that can be squeezed out of a pastry tube, sort of like a fancy funnel cake. I don’t like pastry bags. The idea of cleaning them makes me nervous. I will not be making those at home any time soon.

But what Auntie Em hands out and what Lucie’s recipe describes is a biscuit-like fried dough, a cross between a biscuit and a doughnut. A bisnut, to quote my friend Ronne. In short, a stiff dough that is rolled out, cut, and fried. The small amount of dough was easy to handle and surprisingly quick to make.

Clearly these are not the same thing.

It strikes me that something so simple has evolved into something entirely different that few people recognize. Isn’t that what we do with things though? We take something utilitarian and add to it to make it better. This is good, but sometimes we get so caught up in our own invention that at some point this basic thing changes into an unapproachable masterpiece. So we quit trying. We quit using it.

I encourage you to try these Crullers sometime soon. Because searching beyond what we know is good and necessary. We reach, learn, grow, and hopefully come away all the wiser. But sometimes, when things get too complicated, it’s good to go home again.

Recipe:

 Ingredients

1 Tbl. Sugar

3 Tbl. Buttermilk

1 egg

¼ tsp soda

¼ tsp salt

1 ½ cups flour

2 cups lard, shortening, or vegetable oil

Instructions:

Heat 2” of oil over medium heat in a deep skillet. Mix all of remaining ingredients and roll dough to ¼” thickness. Cut into 2” biscuits or 4” doughnuts.  Fry for 3 minutes on each side. Drain on paper towel. Eat while warm.