During my niece’s college years, she telephoned one day in a quandary about a Sociology assignment: she had to write about our family’s ethnic traditions. Such assignments can be problematic for a generic Caucasian from lower Michigan. Try as we might, neither of us could think of any family traditions suitable for her paper. The theoretical possibilities were endless; the reality, nil. Finally, we figured out why: we are Midwestern Bland Assimilated Nothings. That is our ethnic background.

When my ancestors (combining heritages from England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Germany, Italy, and Holland) immigrated to America in the 19th century, they wanted to become completely American as quickly as possible. Back then, to be ethnic was not to be hip; to be ethnic was to be Other, alien, suspect. So, except for those from Britain, my ancestors quickly abandoned their native languages. And regardless of nation of origin, they ditched their native customs and foods in order to blend in.

My niece and I talked about this, then spent some time imagining the Midwestern Bland Assimilated NothingFest, an annual celebration at which people would gather to play horseshoes and eat hot dogs, hamburgers, Kraft macaroni and cheese, garlic-free spaghetti, Good Humor bars, and green Jello containing cubes of canned pear and topped with Miracle Whip. We laughed through it all, but the fact is that I have long envied people with a definite ethnicity. It seems to make their lives richer than mine in countless ways, many of which involve food. A number of my Chicago neighbors are observant Jews who build much of their lives around distinctively Jewish foods; my friend of Italian ancestry, who speaks Italian and makes periodic trips to the motherland, always returns with tales of spectacular foods and wines; my friend who immigrated from Hungary as a child thinks nothing of making spaetzle and paprikash from memory while speaking Hungarian with her brother on the phone.

My family has no such ethnic local color (and flavor) to offer -- or so my niece and I thought. But, though I may lack carefully preserved family sayings in foreign languages and a cache of ancestral recipes from various nonnas and granmeres, I do have one thing: the memory of my mother’s sublime fried dough. To me, that counts for a lot.

Due to dietary restrictions, fried dough is a thing of the past in my family. That’s a shame, for if I had to name one dish, out of the hundreds I have consumed, as my all-time favorite, my mom’s fried dough would be the one.

My maternal grandmother evidently held a similar opinion. My grandfather belonged to the local Kiwanis Club, and when he would go to one of their luncheons, Gramma would come to our house for lunch. On those days, fried dough was always on the menu. My grandmother considered fried dough the perfect accompaniment to another of her favorites: freshly hard-boiled eggs, eaten while still hot with salt, pepper, and plenty of butter. (Hard-boiled eggs aren’t easy to peel when hot, and they’re an absolute mess to eat this way, but the wonderfully savory result is worth it.) Gramma was the one who had taught my mother to make fried dough, and there’s something pleasing and symmetrical and just about the fact that she, in turn, benefited from the knowledge she imparted.

On Kiwanis luncheon days, my mother would time her lunch with Gramma to the perfect rise of the dough. On many other occasions, though, the dough would be rising in mid-afternoon. The timing was of crucial importance to me, even if not to the bread itself.

My mother made homemade bread every week -- brown, high loaves, the scent of which acted as aromatherapy on our family, instantly lightening any dark moods we may have dragged into the house with us. I felt a surge of happiness when, arriving home from school, I was greeted by the warm smell of bread-in-progess, and entered the kitchen to see the dough still in its crockery bowl on the counter, modestly draped with a tea towel while the yeast did its work. If loaves had not yet appeared, then fried dough was a distinct possibility.

Waiting for that possibility to materialize was an exquisite torment. I would lift the towel and peek at the dough, so dilatory in rising, and tell my mother I thought it was ready. She would reply that it was not, prompting me to wander from the kitchen, yearning, impatient. Sometimes I pinched off a bit of raw dough and held it in my mouth, feeling the fizzing bite of the yeast, testing the springy texture of the dough before consuming it. The raw dough was undeniably good, but I knew it couldn’t hold a candle to what was coming.

When, at last, the dough had risen to the proper point, my mother would put a cast-iron skillet on the stove to heat, then cut off a couple of handfuls of dough and enlist my aid in shaping them into rounds roughly the size and thickness of generous hamburger patties. After melting no small amount of butter in the pan, she would add the dough patties and cook them slowly. Time dragged as I watched with a vigilance I brought to few other areas of life. The dough puffed as it cooked, sizzling cozily, and when the right moment came, Mom flipped them and cooked the other side, just as slowly, as a deliriously rich scent filled the air.

Eventually the fried dough, now become bread, would be ready for Mom to transfer it to plates, split each piece, put more butter inside, where it instantly melted, then close the halves together again. Then was the time to sit at the table, cups of tea at hand, and fall silent as we ate the still-hot food.

This was the sort of food that was deserving of silence, of full attention: golden and crisp on the outside, chewily tender within, with the lushness of butter both inside and out. We ate fried dough by picking it up, whole, and eating it like a sandwich. Warm butter would run sweetly down our fingers, and we would lick it off (the sort of behavior Mom usually discouraged) unselfconsciously before taking another bite.

That, to me, is how food ought to taste: aromatic, profoundly satisfying, a fulfillment of anticipation. Like all things good for you. Like home. To this day, whenever I smell anything remotely like fried dough, I’m right back in my mother’s kitchen, wide-eyed with anticipation, butter at the ready.

When I was growing up, my mother was an excellent cook, and a fairly adventurous one, too. It had not always been so. She learned to cook from Gramma, who was accustomed to cooking in bulk for farmhands and really wasn’t concerned about gastronomy. (She was especially slapdash about baked goods. If a batter seemed too thick, she would simply add water until it looked right, and if it looked too thin, she might toss in some breadcrumbs. "This doesn’t taste the way it did last time," Grampa would say. "I had to doctor it up," she would reply, tartly, thus ending the conversation.) Barring fried dough and a few other items in her culinary repertoire, Gramma was an indifferent cook.

Before they married, my father – understandably, I think -- insisted Mom learn to cook from his own mother. Surprisingly, the resultant cooking lessons did not destroy the two womens’ relationship; my mother was eager to learn, my grandmother happy to teach, and Mom soon branched far beyond desiccated pork chops and doctored baked goods. The dishes she learned from my paternal grandmother were as American as those fried pork chops, but far more varied, and nicer to eat.

Mom did learn one demonstrably ethnic dish from her mother-in-law: finnan haddie, a sort of lutefisk common to the Upper Peninsula, where Dad grew up. My father and brother loved finnan haddie, my mother thought it edible, and my sister and I ran for the hills whenever its powerful odor sprang at us from the kitchen. But finnan haddie doesn’t really count as part of our ethnic family business, because my dad’s ancestry contained no Scandinavians; there were just a lot of them in his hometown of St. Ignace, and, thus, a lot of people who ate finnan haddie.

This was the first instance of my mother’s importation of ethnic foods into our household. Oddly, though, these foods, like finnan haddie, were always part of someone else’s ethnicity. Mom co-opted East Indian chicken curry, learned from a friend who had been a missionary in India, and Armenian stuffed grape leaves, which an Armenian friend taught her to make. Even when she started to make English plum pudding -- still a Christmas tradition at her house -- it was not a recipe from the English branch of our family she used, but one from the English ancestors of a family friend. We were, indeed, thoroughly assimilated, and most of Mom’s recipes were very much American: roasts, meatloaf, macaroni and cheese, New England boiled dinner, pan-fried fresh-caught perch with homemade tartar sauce, all made from scratch with great skill and beautiful results.

I wonder, though, how American pan-fried dough really is. It is nowhere to be found in such quintessentially American sources as The Betty Crocker Cookbook, or in classics such as 1959’s All New Fannie Farmer Boston Cooking School Cookbook (although the latter does feature six different bread pudding recipes). I’ve told a number of native-born Americans about Mom’s fried dough, too, and have yet to run across anyone whose family made this delicacy. So how did it find its way into my grandmother’s, and then my mother’s, kitchens?

As it turns out, nearly every nationality includes some form of fried dough in its cuisine. There’s the puri of the Indian subcontinent, Native American fry bread, Chinese fried bread, Mexican sopaipillas (particularly delectable served warm and drizzled with honey), the langos of Hungary, and many, many others. Most fried dough recipes are sweet -- beignets, bismarks, the South American bunuelo, and the endless changes rung on the doughnut, among countless others -- and are almost universally deep-fried. Other recipes, though, are savory, and some even escape the deep-fryer.

The latter concoctions are especially apt to turn up in Great Britain in the form of breads such as potato farls, griddle scones, or bannock. Typically, they are leavened (with baking powder rather than yeast, though potato farls are unleavened), and their preparation is admirably straightforward: shape the dough and flatten it; pan-fry it in a skillet or on a griddle, first on one side, then the other, so that the inside is puffed and the outside is deliciously browned; serve warm, with butter.

That sounds awfully familiar. In fact, even with the absence of yeast, it sounds a lot like what went on in my mother’s kitchen on certain afternoons, decades ago. The fried dough of my childhood was quite likely the buttery, savory fruit of the British branches of the family tree. Ancestors from the British Isles were surely making bannock and potato farls for generations before their descendants sailed the Atlantic and became relentlessly American; by doing so, they forged a culinary link between my mother’s kitchen and those of my forebears.