When square doughnuts bring a family ’round
Pittsburghers know paczki, the Polish doughnuts that show up in bakeries days before Fat Tuesday. Some people make them at home, the idea being that you use up flour, sugar and oil before Lenten fasting begins.
They do the same thing in Pennsylvania Dutch country, but they call them fasnachts. The traditional German version (Pennsylvania Dutch are actually of German ancestry) is a fried square of dough, usually without filling, with powdered sugar sprinkled on.
That’s the doughnut Gary Carmichael and I grew up with — in Buffalo, N.Y. — and he’s still making them. Not on Fat Tuesday, which is this week. It’s tough to get nearly three dozen family members together on a weekday to make doughnuts. But the extended Carmichael clan will gather to make fasnachts on a Saturday or Sunday before Easter at Toni Car michael Petticord’s house in North Fayette.
Using a recipe from Gary’s Alsatian-American grandmother, they will make and knead the sweet, yeasty dough until it is shiny, and let it rise for an hour. They will punch it down and cut it into squares, then let them rest for another hour. They will stretch each piece before dropping it into sizzling canola oil, frying each side until it is golden brown.
Finally, they will sprinkle powdered sugar on them, eat and remember their fasnacht matriarch, Rita Carmichael.
Rita, Gary’s mother and Toni’s grandmother, died 13 months ago at age 93. She was the authority on anything good to eat, but fasnachts were her specialty. With help from her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nieces, nephews, in-laws and others, she made 125 at a time, sometimes twice before Easter.
“We’re stealing them and she’s yelling, ‘Don’t eat them!’ It was a free-for-all,” says Toni, 46, Rita’s first granddaughter.
With everyone eating them as fast as they were made, few fasnachts survived the day. So Rita also made 20 coffee cakes with the same dough, and sent them home with her helpers.
“My ex-father-in-law still wanted his kuchen even after the divorce,” Gary says, laughing.
The oldest of Rita’s five children, Gary, 70, of Imperial, remembers helping his mother make fasnachts when he was growing up in
East Amherst, N.Y., outside Buffalo. They used an Alsatian recipe from her mother, Clara Ball. (See her fasnacht recipe below.) The recipe’s age is apparent from one ingredient — scalded milk. Heating milk almost to the boiling point was an early form of pasteurization, but kitchen chemists have since discovered that it has other beneficial effects.
My Alsatian American grandmother’s recipe doesn’t require scalding the milk, not that I noticed. That was way above my pay grade. My job as a kid was to shake fasnachts in a paper bag filled with powdered sugar. Plenty of them never made it to a platter, which created a fasnacht fuss with my eight brothers and sisters. Some years, a few of my siblings get together to make fasnachts while my mother supervises. I am not invited.
The Carmichael family moved to Pittsburgh in the early 1960s after Rita’s husband died, leaving her to raise their five kids alone. She got a job with the Pennsylvania Railroad as a keypunch operator and retired 28 years later as a clerk.
Each year, the family came together at her house in Sheraden for Thanksgiving, Christmas, fasnacht making and Easter. Her relatives made and brought dishes from other Rita recipes for potato soup, pizza casserole and tuna noodle casserole.
A few years ago, the fasnacht fest moved to Toni’s house because it’s the biggest and because “I was her favorite,” says Toni, a nurse at Allegheny General Hospital. “If she were here, she would tell you that!”
About 35 family members gathered last year, their first without Rita in charge. Gary, who could eat only two fasnachts because he is diabetic, could feel his mother’s joy.
“She was there in spirit,” he says.
Somehow Rita knew that making square German doughnuts can make a family whole.