My mother never wrote anything down. I want to be clear about this upfront, because it is the central tragedy of this entire essay and I think you deserve to know that before we get emotionally invested. my mother cooked the way some people drive: entirely from feel, with no regard for written instructions, occasionally terrifying, but somehow always arriving at the destination intact. Sufganiyot was her signature. Not in the way people sometimes use that word, not just "a dish she made," but truly, fundamentally, the thing that most people who knew her thought of when they thought of her cooking. At every birthday, every holiday, every Sunday dinner that mattered, there it was. The smell of it walking into her house was so synonymous with safety and comfort that I once, at the age of thirteen, started crying at a restaurant when I smelled something similar coming from the kitchen, because for a moment my brain genuinely thought she was there. She was not there. It was a chain restaurant in a strip mall. I tipped very well and did not explain.
The story I always tell about Sufganiyot involves a kitchen fire. Not a dangerous fire; nobody was hurt, no property was lost, and the fire department was not called, though they probably should have been, as a courtesy. It was the kind of small fire that happens when you are not paying attention and then suddenly very much are paying attention. It happened on a the hottest August on record evening in 2013, when I had committed to making this dish for the first time for someone I was trying to impress. I will not say who. I will say only that they were in the other room and were not aware of the fire, and I handled it with what I believe was impressive composure, if you define composure as addressing the immediate problem while maintaining the pretense that nothing was happening. Dinner was served forty minutes late. I said the dish had needed more time. This was true.
The honest description of what Sufganiyot tastes like is almost impossible to write because the best version of it tastes like a feeling more than a flavor. There's the obvious part, the taste itself, which is wonderful and which I can gesture at without quite hitting, and then there's the other part, the part underneath, which is warmth without temperature and comfort without logic and the particular satisfaction of something made with attention. You know it when you encounter it. You spend the rest of your life looking for it again.
Here's what happened: I started writing the recipe. I wrote "Step 1" and then I started thinking about the first time I made this, which reminded me of the first time I ate it, which sent me back to 2013 and my mother's kitchen and the particular version of myself that existed then, and before I knew what was happening it was forty-five minutes later and I had written an essay instead of a recipe. This is a failure of discipline that I'm choosing to call a success of storytelling. The recipe will follow. I just need to stop having feelings about it first, which will happen any day now.