Owner Joanna Pelka poses by the meat counter at the Polish Deli, 5900 W. Charleston Blvd., Friday, Feb. 25, 2022.
Tuesday, March 1, 2022 | 2 a.m.
Poles worldwide will eat over 100 million of these jelly-filled pastries today, which they celebrate as Pączki Day.
Pre-Lenten celebrations come in many varieties — think Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras, Carnival and Shrove Tuesday. But for many Polish Americans and pastry connoisseurs alike, including in the Las Vegas Valley, today is the day to savor a decadent doughnut-like snack that pays homage to a centuries-old homeland tradition.
The pastries are pączki — pronounced as poon-shkee and known singularly as a pączek — a deep-fried piece of dough filled with jam or custard and usually coated with powdered sugar or a glaze of sorts. Scholars say the pastry’s origins date to the middle ages, and caught on in American cities like Buffalo, N.Y., Chicago and Detroit as Polish immigrants flocked to the United States.
In cities like those, pączki are so beloved, the day before Ash Wednesday, which signifies the start of Lent, is known simply as Pączki Day, where lines at local bakeries can be out the door and pączki-eating contests are featured on local news segments.
And though the size of the Polish population in Las Vegas pales in comparison to others, venues here still get enough buzz to keep them busy. “It’s a small Polish community here, but they’re all spread,” said Joanna Pelka, owner of Polish Deli, 5900 W. Charleston Blvd. “We don’t have, like, one huge area where you can find them. They’re all over.”
In most years, Pelka gets her pączki supply flown in from a bakery in Chicago, but this year outsourced the job to a Polish eatery in Los Angeles because of shipping woes. The headache of making them outweighs the demand, adding that “they’re a lot of work.”
At Pierogi Village, 8540 W. Lake Mead Blvd., owner Margaret Grudzinski said she’s been getting pączki from the same place as Pelka for as long as she remembers. For the same time-consuming and laborious reasons she also gets them shipped in.
In all, Grudzinski said she would sell anywhere from 800-1,000 pączki by the end of the day, roughly the same as Pelka.
“The most important thing is that you eat them fresh,” Grudzinski said. “They’re never as good the next day.”
Michal Wilczewski, professor in the department of slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern University, said that while pączki have been enjoyed for centuries, it wasn’t until the reign of Poland’s Augustus III, who sought chefs from France in the to reinvent the treat into what it’s known as today.
“Initially, pączki were not sweet,” Wilczewski said. “They were just sort of these hard, brick-like sort of things, and they were actually filled with fat back then.”
Pączki likely originated out of the need to get rid of sugar, lard, fruit and flower because such ingredients were forbidden under traditional Lenten customs, Wilczewski said. Today, they contain anywhere from 300-450 calories and contain between 15-24 grams of fat.
Even to this day in Europe, pączki are widely eaten on the more customary pre-Lenten holiday known as Carnival, also dubbed Fat Thursday.
“Once Poles start emigrating to the United States and you see, of course, it gets celebrated on Fat Tuesday because in the U.S., we don’t celebrate Fat Thursday, we don’t celebrate Carnival,” Wilczewski. ”And it became a way, of course, for Polish immigrants to maintain these cultural values and traditions that had been around for quite a long time.”
Dedicated customers at Pierogi Village and Polish Deli keep coming back for more.
Tony Cawalla and his wife, Laura Lee Cawalla, both 48, have been shopping at Polish Deli for more than 10 years.
“It’s the best, that’s why we come here,” Tony Cawalla said. “We’re over in the northwest all the way over by Mount Charleston. And we’ll come here just to get lunchmeat, You can’t get the quality they have here in any grocery store.”
The dedicated following doesn’t stop there.
Ron Levandoski called Las Vegas home for 13 years before moving to his current residence of Ivins, Utah, just outside of St. George. Even still, he’ll come back to Polish Deli once or twice a month to stock up on goods before heading back to Utah.
“You can’t get (pączki) anywhere else outside of Detroit, Buffalo or Chicago,” Levandoski said with a grocery basket full of candy in hand. “When we come into town, this is the main focus. We’ll come here just to visit, we’ll stay at a casino, grab a whole bunch of food then go back home, and we’re good for another couple of weeks.”
Pelka considers herself lucky to have even started her deli in the first place. She left her hometown not far from Poland’s capital of Warsaw in 1987 to visit family in Montreal. Due to political instability in Poland back then, she couldn’t believe her fortune to get a travel visa.
But when it was time to go home, she simply stayed put. Next thing she knew, she met her future husband, Zdzisław, while living in Canada. The two moved to Las Vegas in 1997 and have been running the deli since 2002.
And as Pelka gets ready to shut the door on another Pączki Day, she finds glee in having helped with
another year of satisfied customers.
“Only during the year they’re fattening,” Pelka said, smirking. “On Fat Tuesday, zero calories.”
