Tomorrow is the day known as Fat Tuesday or Mardi Gras. The last day before Lent. The day to indulge in all that your piety requires you to give up for the next forty days. This means different things in different places. In New Orleans, it means parades, parties, drinking, beads and a few more potential lawsuits for the minds behind the "Girls Gone Wild" DVD series. In areas with a large Polish population, like portions of Chicago or, apparently, West Michigan, it means something else entirely: Paczki. What is that and how do you say it?
Based on what I know (which isn't much) Paczki is pronounced as either "punch-key" or "poonch-key" depending on who you ask. Paczki also seems to be the plural of paczek ("pohn-chek").
Great, now we can say it, but do we have any idea what it is? A few weeks before Fat Tuesday, local bakeries begin to advertise that Paczki are coming. That's the first sign that it has to be good. If it comes from a bakery and is meant to be indulgent, it can't be wrong, can it? At first glance, they appear to be simply jelly doughnuts. In fact, one of the places selling paczki has a sticker on the boxes with the slogan, "It's not just another jelly doughnut." So what sets it apart? They are much denser than your average jelly doughnut; much more like a roll or a chewy loaf of bread. This is then filled and covered in powdered sugar. What are they filled with? So far this year, I have seen fruits of all sorts, Bavarian cream, chocolate Bavarian cream and Holland cream (think super sweet cake icing thick enough to use as mortar when you build your next house--the perfect way to send someone's blood sugar spiraling out of control).
If you want to make your own paczki, here is a recipe from Food Network. I haven't tried it, so I have no idea how good it actually is. If that's not your style, perhaps you'd prefer paczki dolls. Why wouldn't you want a stuffed toy made in the likeness of a filled pastry?
Let's recap: We have sugary dough deep fried and filled with a sugary substance of one form or another and then covered in more sugar. That my friends is not only delicious but also perfectly appropriate for Fat Tuesday.
And in case you were wondering: Yes, I was eating one while writing this.
Until later...
February 07, 2005
An Aptly Named Day
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[shudder] It's like bread with frosting (or custard). What CK forgot to mention was that to "try" each of the Bavarian cream and Holland cream Paczki's he had to purchase 6 of each. [shudder] And they are all gone 24 hours later. Fat Tuesday indeed!
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