Easter is fast approaching and that can only mean one thing -- Fat Tuesday, also known as Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras. It's the last chance to party hearty before Ash Wednesday when Lent begins.
In the old days, meat and meat by-products, like butter and eggs, couldn't be eaten during Lent. So ingenious cooks used up all their dairy and eggs by making crepe-like pancakes, called nalysnyky in Ukraine, and doughnuts called spurgos in Lithuania, krofne in Serbia, and paczki in Poland.
I can remember waiting in my busia's kitchen, hopping from one foot to the other, barely able to contain myself until the paczki, hot from the frying grease, were cool enough to be dusted with granulated sugar and gobbled up.
She would complain good naturedly that we ate too fast and she couldn't keep up. Somehow, though, she always did.
Gone are the days when the window of opportunity for savoring a paczki was 24 short hours once a year on Fat Tuesday. Now, most bakeries offer these chubby fry cakes the entire Lenten season. So, go ahead, become a pre-Easter feaster.
Any fried-in-the-fat paczki lover will tell you that a doughnut and a paczki are not one and the same. Sure, they may look alike but that's where the similarity ends.
Paczki are made with a richer dough that has more eggs and sugar and they're cut larger, without a hole. When properly made, they look like huge, round baseballs. Some varieties have no filling, like my busia's, and are rolled while still warm in granulated sugar.
Others are packed with prune, raspberry and custard fillings and dusted with confectioners' sugar or glazed with a flat icing. Gourmet fillings are diluting the pure breeds, but prune and raspberry still hold sway.
Here's one fact that might deflate your paczki-eating experience quicker than you can say dobry (good) -- each one rings up at a hefty 500 calories.
You'll have to dance a few polkas to work these babies off, but why not cast caution to the wind and make them anyway. Everybody's Polish on Paczki Day!
If time is keeping you from enjoying paczki, Polish Funnel Cakes might be a quicker way to go.
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