The Polish language also indicates that doughnuts hold a special place in Polish hearts. There exist several proverbs and idioms about pączki, the best known of which is ‘live like a doughnut in butter’, meaning to live in clover. Another – far less known and far more vivid – is the warning: ‘those who don’t eat a stack of pączki on Fat Thursday will have an empty barn and their field destroyed by mice’.
As the last proverb indicates, doughnuts are believed to bring happiness, and refusing to eat them is considered not only rude, but also unlucky. Accordingly, contemporary Polish pastry chefs endeavour to cater even to vegan or gluten-intolerant doughnut-lovers. Even though the traditional recipe calls for lard, eggs, wheat flour, and loads of sugar, new variations are created for every possible dietary restriction. Fillings also vary: the traditional rose preserve can be replaced with vanilla custard or chocolate ganache. The only rule is to make them light and fluffy, which is only achieved when the yeast dough is properly aerated.
As it often happens with recipes that are considered ‘traditionally Polish’, there is some cultural controversy. For example, some people argue that pączki are merely Berliner Pfannkuchen, sometimes known as Berliners (famous for a John F. Kennedy controversy: an urban legend states that when saying ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’, instead of ‘Ich bin Berliner’ during his visit to West Berlin in 1963, the American president called himself a ‘jelly doughnut’ and not a ‘citizen of Berlin’, therefore causing a lot of laughter between native speakers; this is not true, since people from Berlin only use the name Pfannkuchen to describe these pastries). Indeed, the differences between them are minimal (like the ratio of flour in the dough or the time spent frying in fat), but so is the difference between Berliners and the Italian bomboloni or the Dutch oliebollen. With traditional recipes, there's rarely a need for definitive appropriation. What matters is the role a dish plays in a nation's collective imagination – and pączki are very dear to Poles.
