[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Good Fryday



A SMALL, GOOD THING,
                                        or,
                     OU SONT LES BEIGNETS D'ANTAIN?

You would have to talk about donuts, doughnuts, dough-naughts, during
Lent, wouldn't you? They have been my favorite bakery item ever since I
can remember.  Not that I've given them up as once I might or must have.
Could be that some people have, though, so luckily relief is just around
the corner of  Saturday.  I did give up chocolate, as did daughter
Lilly, and we look forward to breaking that fast with chocolate eggs for
Easter breakfast.  I've cut back on my donut consumption but I donut
think I could give them up altogether.  Too many memories.

Babcia moja, my father's mother, Michalyna, used to make punczki
following some recipe she'd learned in Poland before emigrating in
1911.  We grandchildren would sit at her table and eat them fresh from
the kettle, rolled in sugar and cinnamon or shaken in a bag of snowy
powdered sugar. So enduring was this recipe that I tasted fried,
yeast-raised donuts just like that in Poland four years ago in the homes
of my cousins.  Polish bakeries, too, make something like them. A
favorite kind are filled with rose-petal jam, a delicacy something on
the order of  the Moctezuma's hummingbird tongue salad. In the days just
prior to Lent, particularly the preceding Thursday, Poles buy and eat
great quantities of punczki, rose-petal jam filled and less exotic
sorts. Used to be they would then not eat donuts until Easter. Now they
just cut back to one a day.

My mother used to make a great yeast-raised donut, using the Fannie
Farmer Cook Book recipe. Of these I recall the hint of nutmeg, a spice
we seldom met with elsewhere. From infancy through gradeschool winters I
remember times when supper consisted of nothing but piles of these
donuts, (done up again in one's choice of sugar) and large glasses of
cold, fresh milk.  After we'd sold our last cow we had to walk to the
neighbor's farm across the valley (really uphill both ways) to fetch
milk.  It was worth it, even though you could then scarcely pick up a
glass in hands made hooks from the cold and eight pounds of milk toted a
country mile.  In later years my mother told me that she would make
donuts like this when we had little else to eat in the house, money
having run out. She knew that the fat and sugar would satisfy us.
Indeed, it did that and more.  Donut days were better than snow days off
from school.  And when the two coincided, it was like, like, like,
Friday the 13th, except, except, except completely lucky.

Famously, in toddlery, I disrupted a church service by persistently
calling out, "I want a donut. I want a donut."  I do not recall the
incident except as a family and neighborhood story, but I expect I
wanted one made by either my grandma or my mother.  In memory they
remain my touchstones of donutness, and all the donuts I meet and greet
and eat nowadays are feeble substitutes.  However, as feeble substitutes
go, the apple fritters in the cafe above my office are some of the
best.  I think I'll have one when I go in later today. Won't you join
me?

Yours, in search of times lost,

Michael "Donoughting 'til you hear from me" Tarabulski
Titanic Night
Moscow, Idaho

A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List!

To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to listserv@listserv.muohio.edu
      In body of message:  SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname
                    *or*:  UNSUB ARCHIVES
To post a message, send e-mail to archives@listserv.muohio.edu

Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html

Problems?  Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <rschmidt@lib.muohio.edu>