It's Tłusty Czwartek!

Nicola Miller

Nicola Miller

— 3 min read
Three sugar-dusted fat round doughnuts sit on a white bed-edged plate.
Photo by Karolina Kołodziejczak / Unsplash

Happy Tłusty Czwartek ( Fat Thursday) to all who celebrate! Years ago, I wrote about this wonderful Polish holiday for OFM30, where every available bit of space in my local Polski sklep is covered in trays of fat doughnuts (Pączki). They're a traditional treat today, and the line at the till was long! My choices: pistachio, custard and rosehip jam, and plum butter. They also had doughnuts filled with cheese that were folded rather than the more traditional round shapes.

A line of rust-red coloured plastic bakers trays behind the till counter filled with different kinds of doughnuts. The ones in the foreground are the folded cheese doughnuts. The rest are either dusted with sugar or covered in white icing. Some of the iced doughnuts are sprinkled with pistachios
My local store early this morning

I spoke to Ren Behan for my piece, who, at the time, was about to publish her wonderful book, The Sweet Polish Kitchen. You'll find Ren's recipes for classic Polish iced doughnuts with jam, a super luxury version filled with custard or advocaat cream, a mini vegan poppy seed version, and Quick Cream Cheese Doughnut Bites.

The talented Zuza Zak has a recipe for aromatic doughnuts with an old-style rose filling in her cookbook Polska: New Polish Cooking; you can make the jam according to her recipe or buy it from your local International store.  Michal Korkosz has a recipe for pączki with rose petal preserves and lemon glaze (Pączki z konfiturą różaną i cytrynowym lukrem) in his book, Fresh from Poland: New Vegetarian Cooking from the Old Country, and Agatha Kulaga and Erin Patinkin fill their doughnuts with prune butter.

In The Polish Kitchen, Mary Pinińska writes about visiting Blikle, a confectioner in Warsaw whose doughnuts, "made small and coated with chopped orange peel are.... absolutely the best doughnuts I have ever tasted." From her, I learned Pączki, the Polish word for doughnut, means bud- an exquisitely appropriate name as we move towards spring.

A cream cermaic wavy-edged plate on a tablecloth patterned with green and white lily of the valley leaves and flowers. On the plate, five doughnuts. At the front, an iced pistachio and an iced custard and rosehip jam, on top and behind, plum butter-filled
My doughnuts!
Another rusty-red plastic tray of iced doughnuts sat on the floor of my local Polski sklep

Here's Old Line Plate, one of my favourite sites, writing about the recipes for Pączki found in her collection of vintage Maryland cookbooks and her experience of making them at home.

The Polonist has a recipe here.

"The process is so sensory–the circles of dough are the softest little pillows you can possibly imagine, the poof they do when they hit the hot oil is like magic..." writes Christina of Homespun Home.

A piece by Jaya Saxena and Lucas Kwan Peterson for Eater.

You don't have to remove your clothing to make them:

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