Indulgences

You might recognize the word from peeling gothic letters on a dirty bakery window, the kind that exists in the changing parts of town. If you saw a paczki in person, you might recognize it as a jelly donut. You would pronounce it POONCH-key, or if you want to sound a little pretentious, PAUNCH-key, but if you went ahead and said PATZ-key, no one would really mind. No one is keeping track. Giving things up is, after all, the name of the game.

Last fall I was diagnosed as a “highly allergic” person. Months of tight chests, exhaustion, and dizziness had finally resulted in a single yet multitudinous diagnosis. Among the laundry list of things to avoid – all grasses, all trees, all animals – was yeast. It’s controversial, as allergies go. Yeast usually makes a happy home in our guts and cunts and mouths. But it can malfunction, just like how allergies are a malfunction of our immune systems, which seem to fuck up all the time these days. Overdrive, undergrowth, sensitivity to the max.

Yeast is in all things delicious: bread, cheese, beer, wine, barbecue-flavored potato chips. All my favorite things. The first few months after my diagnosis I would still occasionally knowingly eat these foods. That my face would bloat and my ears would clog seemed, in the face of freshly buttered toast or homemade farmer’s cheese, like a decent trade. I regretted it every time.

Many people think paczki is the singular form of the word, as in I ate a pazcki, but she ate three paczkis. Paczki is actually plural. Why won’t people shut up about paczki. The singular form is paczek (POON-chek). Nobody in the states actually says this unless they want to be deliberately pedantic. Sometimes I feel this way, but less so lately. Now I say it the wrong way, just like everybody else.

Paczkis are almost solely found in the Midwest, especially Michigan, which has large pockets of Polish and other Eastern European peoples. Technically, you’d only eat them if you were Catholic. When asked about my religious preferences I usually say that I was raised Catholic, so I’m close enough. But Catholics and Michiganders alike eat them on what we call Paczki Day, a.k.a. Mardi Gras, a.k.a. Shrove Tuesday, which comes right before the forty days of Lent, also known as the shit part of February heading into March, also known as When Will This Winter End Already.

Lent is a time of abstinence and fasting that commemorates Jesus’ forty days in the desert. Pre-Lenten treats of all kinds serve the same purpose, an easy way for committed penitents to get rid of the bad stuff, a.k.a. the good stuff, before the fasting begins. King cake in New Orleans, semla in Sweden. Paczkis come from Poland, a country that knows a thing or two about austerity.

What your particular version of Lenten fasting looks like differs based on level of orthodoxy and exactly how much guilt you built up during the holidays. You might give up sweets, or maybe alcohol. The key is that whatever you give up must be something difficult for you. It’s supposed to be a sacrifice. If you already don’t eat meat or can’t abide processed sugar, you can’t coast on your preferences. If you’re already a teetotaler, get ready to double down.

Paczkis, naturally, have yeast in them. Not being able to drink beer or eat cheese certainly feels like suffering. Spending the night in someone else’s house can be a recipe for disaster. Italian food is forever off the menu. Micromanaging every morsel you imbibe is nothing less than a complete pain in the ass, and anyone with food allergies will tell you likewise.

But there is a certain amount of – I don’t want to say pride, but sense of belonging that comes with this new identity marker. It feels strangely similar to how I discovered feminism in college; I cannot lie that part of its allure wasn’t this ability to...