Throwback to February 9, 2016

1. It is acceptable to eat richer-than-normal foods, since it is the dead of the long, cold, cruel winter and we need to build up a fat reserve to last all through the long, cold, cruel Lent.

2. It is acceptable to party hard, dance wildly, and sing loudly, all to get it out of our systems, because, according to our grandmothers, it is a sin to have any fun at all during Lent.

3. Those boxes of pale, flattened, doughnuts with jelly that are being sold at Kroger in a box labeled “pączki” are an abomination! True pączki are fatter, rounder, fried to a luscious brown with a golden yellow inside. And they have prune filling. And they are coated in powdered sugar. And they are best when sold in brown paper bags.

4. Singular: pączek. Plural: pączki. Then again, I suppose we should always use the plural, because who can stop at just one?

5. The best pączki in the world are made by the Blikle bakery in Warsaw, established in 1869. (I can still taste them…) The bakery website says it has “sweetened customers’ lives in both those happy and those bitter moments,” which is probably the best description I have ever heard of how pączki fit into the Polish psyche.