[Note: I wrote this in 2023. Krakus is now closed 😔. An alternative shop in Baltimore is At the Polish Table. – k]
I love going to Krakus deli on Fleet street. As soon as you step inside you’re greeted with the smell of the various sausages, which hang behind the counter. A small selection of Polish books, cosmetics and supplements always piques my curiosity. Towards the back, at the end of the rows of jams and jellies and pickles and soups, there lays a box of baked goods. When I go into Krakus to buy myśliwska, a type of sausage, or twaróg farmer’s cheese, I almost always leave with a pączek, a polish doughnut filled with jam.
Elizabeth Staats (1852-1933, Kent County) collected recipes – hundreds of them.
The collection started with a scrapbook Staats inherited from her mother Mary Griffith (1829-1892), whose original book contains handwritten recipes for food as well as things like soap and a “cure for cholera.” Staats finished that book before compiling the second book of over 300 recipes. (The two books are now housed at the Maryland Historical Society.) She was partial to cakes and desserts, although she occasionally clipped recipes for things like “Cheese Fondu”, scrapple, or deviled crabs. Many of the recipes are crossed out, “no good” written beside them, or with newer scraps pasted right over the old handwritten recipes.
There’s a social register’s worth of sweets: “Fannie Goodall’s” Chocolate Cake; “Alice Drekas’” Boiled Icing; “Laura Townsend’s” Crullers.
But Staats didn’t just rely on her extended personal network for recipe ideas – she had access to newspapers and multiple magazines like “The Country Gentleman,” “Ladies’ Home Journal,” and “Good Housekeeping.”
This recipe for “Unsurpassed Doughnuts” came from the latter. Good Housekeeping was founded in 1885 by publisher Clark W. Bryan with a mission to “perpetuate perfection as may be obtained in the household.” The new magazine combined that movement towards “domestic science” with fiction, poetry, and even some puzzles.
Paging through Staats’ scrapbooks, I could easily envision a woman spending leisurely afternoons poring over the magazine, clipping out good things she would like to eat.
Below her transcription of the doughnut recipe, Staats wrote “”Fine. Used this winter 1903.” Unlike so many others in the scrapbooks, this recipe has been tried – and approved. It had been submitted to Good Housekeeping my a Mrs. N.W. (Charlotte) Northrup, of Grand Rapids MI.
As is so often the case, the yeast component is basically unknowable. Its hard to understand how a recipe could even have meaning with such a huge variable. Nevertheless, I used a few teaspoons of dry yeast, and set the ingredients out to ferment overnight as instructed.
I made these doughnuts on the day of the Mayor’s Annual Christmas Parade. We cooked them up in my cousins’ Medfield kitchen and shared them with neighbors. They were pretty great. So was the parade, as usual.
Recipe:
“1 cup sugar, 3 cups milk, 1 cup yeast, make these into a sponge and let stand overnight; in the morning add 1 cup sugar, ½ cup butter, 3 eggs, ½ nutmeg, ½ tea-spoon soda, stir in flour until stiff.Let rise again, then mix stiff enough to roll, and cut into shape desired. Let rise again until light, then fry.Fine. Used this winter 1903To save grease in frying doughnuts; put ½ teaspoonfull of ginger in grease when hot.”
Recipe from Maryland Historical Society MS 1765, “Mary Black Griffith Cookbook”, via Good Gousekeeping Volume 35, 1902
Interpretation, as I recall it:
2 Cups sugar
3 Cups milk (room temperature)
4.5 teaspoons dry yeast
.5 Cup butter, soft
.5 tsp salt
3 eggs
.5 tsp nutmeg
.5 Teaspoons baking soda
flour (6-8 cups)
Combine 1 cup of sugar with the milk and yeast; let stand over night. In the morning add the other cup of sugar, then beat in eggs one by one. Beat in butter plus the other ingredients. Gradually add flour until dough starts to become smooth and form a ball that pulls away from the sides of mixer or bowl. Knead for about a minute then leave to rise for about 2 hours.
Beat down and roll to about ½” thickness, cut into desired shapes and let rise another 1-2 hours – until puffing up.
Fry in hot vegetable oil until golden brown – about 1-2 minutes each side.
Roll in sugar mixed with cinnamon and nutmeg. Accept compliments graciously.
“Today is Kinkling Day and the smell of hot grease and fresh kinklings permeates many homes. Some people say that for good luck some of the kinklings must be fed to the chickens. This is done in a lot of
cases, but in most instances the housewife would rather do the eating.
Others declare that today is pancake day, and that tomorrow is kinkling day. Those interested can settle it among themselves.” – The Frederick news, Tuesday March 7, 1916
While Louisiana has its world-famous Mardi Gras traditions, Maryland is not without our own rituals in preparation for Lent, and as with other regional traditions, they have been woven into the cultural fiber well beyond their religious context or national origin.
Atwaters Bakery may be peddling exotic King Cakes at me but I’ll take a Polish pączek from Krakus Deli or a German fastnacht, thank you. Much like scrapple, the latter is yet another Pennsylvania Dutch food that is as much a part of Maryland as it is anywhere.
Frederick News 1932
“Fasnachts were made as a way to empty the pantry of lard, sugar, fat, and butter, which were traditionally fasted from during Lent.” – Wikipedia
In Western Maryland, where they go by the unique name “Kinklings,” these cousins-of-doughnuts are celebrated with an annual flutter of news mentions and a rush on bakeries for “Kinkling Day.”
“‘Eat a doughnut on Shrove Tuesday,’ say the Pennsylvania Dutch, ‘and live a year longer.’
Maryland Germans whose ancestors, like the Pennsylvania Dutch, came from the Palatinate, need no reminder that Tuesday is Fastnacht Day. By this time, they either have stocked the pantry shelf with the necessary ingredients for home-made fastnachts or they have placed an order with one of the bakeries that still make the real things.” – Baltimore Sun, 1958
I remember occasionally hearing my mother and her sisters mentioning the “Fox Nocks” they ate for dinner once a year. Quite a few newspaper-sourced recipes have made their way into decades worth of my family’s meals and apparently this is one of them. My guess is that the article my grandmother got the recipe from was “Doughnuts Everybody Remembers” from January 1963.
We worked with my aunts approximation of this recipe. In the future I would probably complete one of the rises in a refrigerator overnight for convenient timing.
Despite the indulgent premise, fasnachts are actually less sweet than doughnuts. You’ll notice the relatively small amount of sugar in the recipe, although they are rolled in cinnamon sugar on the outside.
One source of confusion for us was the proper method for creating the dough indentations. My aunt remembered them being really stretched out and thin in the middle, my cousin preferred to press the centers in and leave the sides nice and puffy “like little bathtubs.”
When I located the news article it appeared to side with my aunt but we all agreed that the little bathtubs turned out very nice.
This didn’t exactly rid the kitchen of fats, as I now have a gallon of used oil in my kitchen, begging for things to be fried in it.
So much for Lenten fasting…
Recipe:
1 medium potato, peeled and cubed
2 cups salted water
½ cup sugar
1 envelope dry yeast
¼ cup warm water
¼ cup shortening
2 eggs, well beaten
6 cups sifted flour
1 teaspoon salt
Dissolve yeast in the ¼ cup of warm water, adding a pinch of the sugar. Set aside. Cook potato in the salted water until tender. Drain, reserving 1 ½ cups of the water. While the water is still warm, slowly whisk in shortening so it melts. Mash potato & beat in sugar. Add eggs and salt, mixing well. Gradually add hot potato-shortening water. If the mixture has cooled to lukewarm, beat in yeast and then gradually stir in flour until dough is smooth, satin-y, and pulls away from sides of bowl. Knead until smooth and elastic. Place in greased bowl, cover and let rise until doubled in bulk – about 2 ½ hours at room temperature or overnight in the fridge.
Punch down and remove to floured surface to knead further. Divide into two halves, form each into rectangle and roll to about 1/3-inch thick. Cut into 2 inch squares & place on baking sheets to rise again until doubled in bulk.
Pick up each square and press & stretch the center until the center is thin. Fry in hot oil or lard (375°), turning once to brown. Drain on paper towels & shake in a bag of sugar (optional: cinnamon sugar) while still hot.
“In Maryland, Cruller, Doughnut, and Fossnock are synonyms.” – questionable information from “Americanisms–old & New”, 1889
