Paczki and Faworki

The Thursday before Ash Wednesday is Tlusty Czwartek, Fat Thursday, and Poles eat paczki: yeast-raised doughnuts, fried, traditionally filled with rose petal jam, glazed and sometimes scattered with candied orange peel. Estimates of national consumption on the day run to a hundred million or more, and the queues outside the well-regarded bakeries in Warsaw and Krakow start before dawn and run round the block - Blikle in Warsaw, established 1869, is the best-known name and the queue there is a news item annually. Alongside them are faworki, also called chrusty or angel wings: thin strips of dough knotted, fried until brittle and dusted with icing sugar, made in the same season. A good paczek is filled with real rose jam rather than plum or generic fruit, and is eaten the day it is made. Both are available year-round but are properly a carnival food.

What you actually see

• Rose-filled doughnuts - yeast dough, fried and glazed, with rose petal jam.
• Fat Thursday queues - lines round the block at the well-known bakeries.
• Faworki - brittle knotted ribbons of fried dough under icing sugar.
• A hundred million in a day - the scale of national consumption estimated.

When to go

Fat Thursday, in February. An hour.

Honest expectations

On Fat Thursday the good bakeries sell out by midday and the queues are long. Rose filling is the traditional one and is increasingly replaced by cheaper fruit. Both go stale within a day.

Nearby

Any Polish city centre on the day; Warsaw and Krakow have the famous queues.