My name hides the fact that I grew up a mostly Polish kid in a mostly Polish town. And even though two of my grandparents grew up speaking Polish at home, I don’t remember ever having pączki. I think I remember some of my friends at school talking about them (for a few years I attended the Polish Catholic grade school in town), but that’s about it. It’s one of those traditions that sort of died out for a while.

When I moved back to Michigan from Denver a little over ten years ago, though, it seems like pączki were EVERYWHERE—grocery stores, convenience stores, etc. I think that once the old Polish bakeries started closing, they found their way to the mainstream stores. We do still have one Polish bakery in town and they do the traditional pączki (prune…ew) along with custard and a couple of other jelly flavors. And the people still line up outside the door to have them on Fat Tuesday. (And, it being a somewhat hard-hit, blue collar town, they line up again on Wednesday to buy them at half off.)

I’ve always wondered how much of their resurgence has to do with the rise of food culture in the US. I had one for the first time in a long time this year. I was meeting with a client and he had some in his office. It was blueberry and it was pretty great.