No Jelly
As Ben was making espresso, humming his song, and a little annoyed that Amy didn’t seem to share in his excitement, his thoughts took him back to his childhood memories of paczki.
The interesting thing to him, as he recalled, was that the versions that his mom made were nothing like the giant, dough balls stuffed with filling that he was now used to eating on Fat Tuesday.
He remembered his mom bringing out the pot that she usually used for making chicken soup. Ben was always amazed at the size of the pot, and the fact she could fit the entire chicken carcass in it. For paczki, though, he could envision her dumping what seemed like ten gallons of oil in the pot from the yellow, plastic bottles.
What fascinated him most, however, was the giant mercury thermometer she would clamp on the inside of the pot to make sure the oil temperature was just right.
His mom would make dough balls that were roughly the size of a tennis ball, cook them in the oil, and scoop them out, putting them on weathered, metal cooling racks with paper towels underneath to catch any oil that might drip off the balls of dough.
When the balls cooled, his mom would pull out the flour sifter that never looked completely clean. The canister portion looked like an old can that might have been used to hold tomato sauce. It had a grip attached with a handle that, when squeezed, would spin the metal agitator at the bottom of the sifter, scraping along the metal screen and releasing whatever was being sifted.
Ben remembered how happy he would get when his mom would let him put the powdered sugar on the paczki. His little hand would stretch as far as it could, grabbing the grip and pulling the handle open and closed to let the powdered sugar come out of the bottom.
“That crunchy feeling of the agitator against the screen was so cool,” Ben thought.
For all of his life these were the paczki that Ben knew, small, oily, dough balls with powdered sugar on them and no filling.
Thinking through more of his paczki history, Ben fast-forwarded his thoughts to being in college, and his first Fat Tuesday in Chicago. He was missing his mom’s paczki, but a friend brought a box to his room. Ben opened the box and didn’t understand why they were so big. He also wondered why there was filling inside of them. Finally, as he tried one, the dough and outside of the donut tasted nothing like the versions his mom made.
He remembered saying something like, “These are imposters! These are just giant, jelly donuts!”
He also remembered eating them anyway.