Why the Midwest Tastes like Jelly Donuts* on Mardi Gras
“What is Pączki* Day? It’s only the best day of the year.”
Hey, y’all.
This is your midweek love letter from the bars and hearts of the Midwest.
This week I am dragging you down with me into a pączki rabbit hole. This is part one of a tasty two-part epic that traces the Pączki Trail (first mapped by me!), explores how the pastry became a singularly Midwestern treat, explores its places in Polish pride, and asks that burning question: Is the pączki really just a jelly donut?
Enjoy! And don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss part 2, which will come out on April 4, the last day of Lent.
“The drunken-mom girls-night-out vibe is strong in there” my friend Shana says as we approach her. “We had to get out.”
It’s 2:30 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, a rare bluebird day in the greyness that is Michigan in February. Lovey and I are meeting our friends Shana and The Consort at New Palace Bakery in Hamtramck to eat our first-ever “official” pączki (pronounced POONCH-kee). Two of us have never enjoyed the jam-filled Polish donut; the other two have only experienced them from a grocery store box; none of us have ever been to New Palace, which declares itself “Pączki Headquarters.”
Lovey and I gird ourselves and open the door. A wave of sweet, yeasty warmth hits us. Shana is not wrong: The woo girls are loud. Bodies stuffed in winter coats are pressed shoulder to shoulder. The floor is slick with melted snow; one slip would drop everyone in the snaking line like a row of dominoes. Inexplicably, there are portraits of the X-Files’ Scully and Mulder hanging above the bakery case. Handwritten signs are posted, letting us know which filling flavors are sold out.
Lemon and and the traditional rose hip are gone. But they still have prune. Drat.
Pączki Day, aka Fat Tuesday, aka Mardi Gras — all of which celebrate the day before Lent begins on Ash Wednesday — is still more than a week away, yet pączki furor is in full force.
“Is it usually this crazy on a Saturday?” I ask the woman behind the counter.
“It’s crazy but not like this,” she replies.
I lament the lack of lemon-filled pączki – the ones I most want to try – and she winks at me and says she’ll check the back. She returns with two in hand, held aloft like a prizefighter’s belt. We take those, two raspberry and two cream-filled and squeeze our way out the door. We have a big question to answer: Is the Polish pastry just a jelly donut?
Coming to America
New Palace Bakery opened its doors in 1908, smack in the middle of one of the biggest waves of immigration in American history. Not since millions of Germans and Irish flowed into the country in the early 1800s had so many newcomers turned up all at once.
More than 15 million immigrants arrived on our shores between 1900 and 1915 — as many as in the previous 40 years combined. This was the era of the Italian immigrant and, more relevant to our story, the Polish. History books have record of Poles settling in the country as early as 1608 (the first recorded enslaved Africans landed in 1619 and the Mayflower got to Plymouth Rock in 1620), but it wasn’t until two centuries later that these Eastern European peasants and farmers arrived in droves. In 1900, there were approximately 383,000 natives of Poland1 living in the United States; by 1920 an estimated 2 million had made the journey here.
Why were they so keen to get out of Poland? Essentially, life was pretty rough — Poland was known as the “peasants’ hell”2 — and people were looking to escape their Overlords, who had controlled their country and culture for more than a century.
You have to remember that Poland wasn’t even technically a nation when the owners of New Palace Bakery came to America and opened their shop in Hamtramck, then a small village of Germans outside rapidly growing Detroit. Poles had been living as a conquered people and divided country since 1772 when Austria-Hungary, Germany (technically, Prussia) and Russia got together, marched troops into what was then the Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania, took over and then divvied up – or partitioned – the lands. Those three powers would hold the country, dividing it two more times, for nearly 150 years. (It’s way more complicated with lots of bit players and names to keep track of, but that’s the gist. If you want to go deeper, God’s Playground is supposed to be the seminal work.)
The Overlords tried to subjugate Polish culture and nationality by forcing people off their lands, disallowing agrarian inheritances and forbidding the use of the Polish language. The Germans, for example, required the Poles they controlled to speak German, banned Jesuit priests and took over parochial schools3, all in an attempt to quell the Poles’ connection to their rich national identity. They were a people, after all, who had the second codified constitution – just after the United States – and a history of enlightenment.
Naturally, they got pretty pissed off. Here’s how Sister Lucille, C.R., describes it in her 1951 essay, “The Causes of Polish Immigration to the United States,” in the journal of Polish American Studies:
“Tyrannical oppression induced many intellectual and patriotic Poles to emigrate to America, but the survival of the Polish national spirit undoubtedly was a determining factor in the bulk emigration of Poles from Germany, Russia, and Austria.”
So what took them so long? After all, the country had been partitioned since 1772. Why did they start showing up en masse a hundred years later?
To be fair, handfuls of Polish people did make their way to America after that first partition. In fact, in 1834, a group of exiled Poles petitioned Congress4 for a land grant to form a new Polonia colony on the “frontier” – or what is now near modern day Rockford, Ill. Congress initially agreed, but in the end revoked the grant. (And not because, you know, the land technically belonged to the Native peoples of the region, such as the Hopewell, Mascouten and Ottawa tribes; no, it was because existing American-born settlers wanted it.) The first permanent Polish settlement in the country was formed in 1854 in Panna Maria, Texas, about 60 miles southeast of San Antonio.
But most of those previous immigrants tended to be artisans, shopkeepers and dissidents who could afford to find their way to a coast and book passage. Leaving was a luxury of the wealthy. Long travelling distances cut off poor, rural people from the ports of Western Europe and their direct routes to America.
It was that modern marvel, the train, that changed everything. Suddenly, farmers and laborers could get to ports and board ships bound for America. And once they were there – the railroads would take them to new jobs, new homes, new lives.
And when they got here, the diaspora would need snacks – and New Palace Bakery was there to serve traditional Polish delicacies like the pączki.
What is Pączki Day? IYKYK
“What is Pączki Day? It’s only the best day of the year.”
That was my friend Laura’s Facebook post on February 21, 2023, otherwise known as Pączki Day. In other parts of the world and country, you might call it Fat Tuesday, Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras. But whatever its name, they are all celebrations of the final day before the Christian tradition of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday. Things get wild down in New Orleans with parades and king cake, but here in Detroit – and parts of the Midwest – it’s Pączki Day.
When all of those Polish immigrants arrived, they brought the pączki (pronounced POONCH-kee or PONCH-kee depending on who you ask) with them as part of their pre-Lenten traditions. On Fat Tuesday5, they would prepare for Lent by cleaning out their larders of everything that could go bad or is forbidden during the required 40 days of fasting – such as sugar and butter and lard – and have a day of celebration. The centerpiece of those celebrations were pączki: fried, yeasty donuts filled with fruit jams, like the traditional rose hip or prune, as well as lemon berries and custards. The dough is heavier and richer, more like a brioche bun than a plain glazed.
“The actual translation from Polish is ‘little package,’” Michelle Zebrowski of Party Bake Shop near Pittsburgh, told City Cast Pittsburgh. “So that’s pretty much what it is.”
I didn’t grow up Polish or Catholic – or one of the Christian denominations that also celebrate Lent. With a mom brought up Baptist and a dad who believes in his own relationship with God, not one mediated by a church, I didn’t have much exposure to the pageantry side of the faith. So when Lovey and I moved to Detroit and were suddenly inducted into the pleasures of Pączki Day, I had no idea what a pączek (the singular of pączki; pronounced POON-check) was, let alone its connection to the rituals of spring.
People would look at me dumbfounded. How could you not know what pączki are?
Um, how can you not know what green chile is? I would think.
Let’s chalk it up to regional differences.
My friend Laura started eating pączki as a kid going to Catholic school in the Detroit area. She wasn’t Polish, but the tradition was everywhere. It wasn’t until she went to grad school in Madison, Wisconsin, where there was no Pączki Day, that she realized how hyper-regional the holiday is. There weren’t even any pączki that she could find.
Ok. It was another state. She was sad, but it made sense.
But when she started working at the library in Grand Haven, Michigan – Michigan! – she discovered her colleagues had never celebrated Pączki Day. How could that be?! she wondered.
At least she could buy pączki at the local gas station – not ideal, but beggars can't’ be choosers – and force feed them her holiday.
“There's a mix of sentiment and pride for me,” Laura says. “It's a special day, and if you know, you know. It's a truly Detroit/metro Detroit micro-holiday and I treasure it.”
But, I wondered, is it just a white people thing? Is it also part of Black culture or the Black church experience with Lent? I texted a few grew-up-in-Detroit friends who wouldn’t find it odd to get an early morning ping about pączki and race.
“Lol! I didn’t know about paczkis until I was well into adulthood!” my friend Lauren messaged me. “Is there somewhere we can get coffee and a good paczki?”
My friend Candice, however, was like, Gurl, we gotta get on the phone for this nonsense.
“They are not a part of Black culture,” she said when we connected. “But because they exist in a Black city they become a part of Black life. One of the things I love about Detroit is that I know when Ramadan is because it’s part of the culture even though it’s not part of my direct culture. Same thing with pączki and St. Patrick’s Day.”
And she’d already thought ahead: She pre-ordered pączki to be delivered to her office even though she planned to be out of town on Pączki Day.
All Along The Pączki Trail
The first donuts in America, most scholars believe, were oliebollen, or “oil balls” that were fried dough, often studded with apples, that the Dutch brought over in the 1600s. But, despite that very appetizing translation, the donut didn’t become truly popular here until after the first World War and nostalgia for the “donut lassies” was rampant.
In 1917, four women of the Salvation Army volunteered to go overseas to support the troops with religious services, treats and even music played on a Victrola. But, as the telling goes, they got crafty and decided to bring the boys a taste of home. These donut lassies started frying dough in soldiers’ helmets and serving them hot in the trenches.
When the boys came home, their love of donuts and the ladies who served them was so strong the Salvation Army got Congress to create a National Donut Day on June 4. (Didn’t know we had one? Me either.) And the religious organization began greeting new immigrants on Ellis Island with a blanket and a donut.
Welcome to America.
That fried ball of dough probably didn’t look like much to the Polish immigrants, more familiar with their pączki. Regardless, these newcomers had to figure out where to go. Many would choose to stay in New York City, adding to the pressure cooker that were the teeming tenements of the city’s Lower East Side and spreading into parts of Brooklyn.
But many others pushed further west, bringing their culture and their pączki recipes, in search of jobs or looking to join their families or already-established communities. The migration spreads out like tributaries on a map, with rivers of immigrants flowing from New York out to the stockyards of Chicago; the auto factories and stove manufacturers of Detroit; the steel mills and ironworks and mines found in Buffalo, Cleveland and Philadelphia; and the mines and mills of Pittsburgh. A tiny trickle flowed into Wisconsin, primarily around Milwaukee, to join those who had arrived during the earlier artisan-and-dissident phase of immigration.
So many Poles poured into the Midwest that by 1910 they were the largest number of workers in the region’s industries and mining6. In Detroit, Poles made up one-quarter of city’s population by 1914, and by 1921, they were the second largest7 immigrant group in the city – eclipsing the Germans8, who had made up 20% of the city’s population in 1880. Across Lake Michigan, there were 400,000 Polish people9 living in Chicago by 1930 – the city’s largest immigrant group, also surplanting the Germans – and the city had become the center of the Polish diaspora in America.
Today, there are approximately 8.2 million people – or 2.5% of the total U.S. population – with Polish ancestry, according to the 2021 American Community Survey. By comparison, 1 in 10 Americans, or 31.5 million residents, claim Irish heritage. Here is how the states compare, as of the 2021 ACS:
Wisconsin 7.7%
Michigan 7.2%
Illinois 6.0%
Pennsylvania 5.3%
New York 4.0%
Minnesota 3.9%
Ohio 3.2%
Indiana 2.7%
Nebraska 2.6%
North Dakota 1.7%
South Dakota 1.6%
Missouri 1.6%
Iowa 1.2%
That concentration of Polish ancestry remaining pooled in the Upper Midwest, rather than cutting new tributaries to the west or south like other immigrant groups, ensured that a pączek stayed a local, or at best regional, delight unknown to most of the country. It’s hard for a tradition to rise up in, say Iowa, when just 1.2% of the population shares your heritage.
Until Mr. Paczki joined the chat in the 1990s.
Who is Mr. Pączki and how does a self-anointed man from Michigan make it his mission to bring the regional pastry to grocers everywhere?
Find out on April 4 — the last day of lent — when I drop the second part of our epic story.
I’ll bring you along into my first paczek tasting and my attempt to bake them, explain why they are a part of Polish pride and identity, and finally answer the age-old question: Are they just jelly donuts? Hint: sometimes a donut is so much more than just a donut.
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Sister Lucille, C.R., "The Causes of Polish Immigration to the United States," Polish American Studies, III, 1951, p. 85.
Silverman, Deborah Anders, “Polish-American Folklore,” University of Illinois Press, 2000, p. 9.
Sister Lucille, C.R., "The Causes of Polish Immigration to the United States," Polish American Studies, III, 1951, p. 85.
Wiley, Eric, "The Squatters and the Polish Exiles: Frontier and Whig Definitions of Republicanism in Jacksonian Illinois," Journal of Illinois History, 13, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 129-50. https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1057&context=fpml
Traditionally, the paczki tradition was practiced on Fat Thursday, the Thursday before Ash Wednesday. That is still the case in Poland today. But in American culture, the more common Fat Tuesday has prevailed.
Boberg, Alice, “Polish Americans and Their Communities in Cleveland,” Ethnic Studies of Polish Americans in Cleveland, Cleveland State University, 2010, part 2. https://pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu/polish-americans-and-their-communities-of-cleveland/chapter/settlement/
Remigia, M. “The Polish Immigrant in Detroit to 1914.” Polish American Studies, vol. 2, no. 1/2, 1945, pp. 4–11. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20147031. Accessed 27 Feb. 2023.
"Poles Exceed Germans Here," Detroit Free Press; Wednesday, Oct. 4, 1922.
“Poles Lead Chicago Among Foreign Groups,” New York Times, Friday, July 11, 1930, pg. 10.
This year was my first for a pączki. Or at least an imitation of one. Barbara and I got them from our neighborhood grocer, Seasons Market. They weren’t quite genuine but they were good. Amy did you get any of the This year was my first for a pączki. Or at least an imitation of one. Barbara and I got them from our neighborhood grocer, Seasons Market. They weren’t quite genuine but they were good. Amy did you get any of the pączki vodka?
Loved, LOVED this story. I'm never going to be able to do all. the traveling I'd like to do (or afford it!). So this kind of thorough "travel" is exactly what takes its place. Thank you!! (This was all new to me, even though Albion and Cranesville PA had lots of Polish immigrants. But I wasn't curious back then.