Mardi Gras is also Pączki Day, but these Polish doughnut-esque delicacies (say: poinch-kee) deserve more than 24 hours in their honor. Around the world, various cultures celebrate the last days before Lent with various dishes or parties designed to use up all the soon-to-be-forbidden ingredients. Traditionally the Eastern European holiday for fried dough was Fat Thursday, or the final Thursday before Ash Wednesday, but over time in the U.S. it merged with all the other pre-Lent celebrations like Pancake Day and Mardi Gras, and now everyone can eat sweets together and/or twice.
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Pączki, like the other foods for Fat Tuesday, uses copious quantities of milk, butter, eggs, and, of course, oil in which it's fried. It resembles other stuffed, yeasted doughnuts—bomboloni, sufganiyot, and Berliners—but goes heavy on the richness: our recipe uses four egg yolks, for example. They tend to use a little less sugar in the dough than most doughnuts, instead using the filling as the sweetness – usually a fruit or jam piped into the center, like this easy-to-make prune butter.
