If you live in Poland or have just moved here, you've probably noticed that a few days before Lent, pastry shops turn into besieged fortresses. On Fat Thursday (Tłusty Czwartek), there's real sugar chaos. People line up from early morning, and doughnut sales break records. Here are three interesting facts about this day:
100 million donuts in one day
Fat Thursday is the day when Poland turns into doughnut country. On this day, Poles eat about 100 million doughnuts. If you laid them out side by side, you could cover the distance from Warsaw to London. Pastry shops work at maximum capacity, and Producenci pączków (doughnut makers) make their main income of the year.
Donuts bring good luck
There is a belief in Poland: if you don’t eat at least one doughnut on Fat Thursday, the whole year will be unlucky. Therefore, even those who usually watch their figure make an exception on this day. The main thing is not to count calories. The classic Polish doughnut is not just dough with filling, but a real work of art: airy, with thick pink rosehip jam, glazed with sugar or drizzled with chocolate.
Once upon a time, donuts were… salty.
Today, Polish doughnuts are made with soft dough, sweet filling, and sugar glaze. But they were once prepared in a completely different way. In the Middle Ages, doughnuts were salty and even stuffed with meat or lard. They did not contain yeast, so they were dense and hard, like buns. Over time, the taste changed, and now it is difficult to imagine that people once ate doughnuts not with jam, but, for example, with bacon.
Fat Thursday is not just a day to indulge in something sweet, but a real cultural phenomenon. The aroma of fresh doughnuts wafts through the streets, people stand in line, choosing their perfect pączek.
