Olie-Koecken, or Knickerbockers

This delightful ball-shaped fritter or fat cake gained widespread popularity in American cookbooks in the nineteenth century. American cooks had trouble with the Dutch name, hence the almost endless—and sometimes confusing!—variations in spelling. In his study of New Jersey Dutch dialect, J. Dyneley Prince spelled it oljekuk, which was deemed correct New Netherlandish.¹⁶ But New Netherlands a