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== From cannonballs to sponges ==
[[File:Kobieta sprzedająca pączki.jpg|thumb|upright|A street vendor of ''pączki'' in 1934 Warsaw]]
So what's the relationship between a doughnut and a ''pączek''? Are these two different things or just English and Polish names for the same thing? Or is ''pączek'' a specific kind of doughnut? At the top of this post I wrote that the The perfect ''pączek'' , in my opinion at least, is filled with rosehip rose-petal jam, fried in lard and decorated with icing and candied orange zest. But what if you give it a different filling (or no filling at all), fry it butter (or even vegetable oil) and dust with powdered sugar instead? It's still going to be ''pączek''. And a doughnut. So what makes a ''pączek'' a ''pączek'' and what makes a doughnut and doughnut?
If we look into old cookbooks, we'll see that the bakers and pastrycooks of yore had even bigger problems with using the correct terminology. Very often, they seem to have lumped all kinds of fried dough (pancakes, fritters, crullers, doughnuts) under the same label. Let's take, for example, the manuscript recipe collection written at the end of the 17th century at the court of the princely house of Radziwiłł. For the most part, it's a Polish translation of the German cookbook, ''Ein Koch- und Artzney-Buch'' ("A Cookery and Medicine Book"). The anonymous translator chose to render all instances of the German term "''Krapfen''" as "''pączek''", even if he noticed himself that the recipe was really for pancakes rather than doughnuts.
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I don't really know why the German "''Waffen-Krapfen''" ("war fritters"?) were translated as "priestly doughnuts". In modern German the word "''Krapfen''" does refer to a doughnut. But in some regions of Germany (Brandenburg, Saxony and Hither Pomerania) doughnuts are known as "''Pfannkuchen''" which is the word for "pancakes" in other German-speaking parts. The Radziwiłł cookbook also mentions "''kręple''", or a kind crullers. Here, both the recipe and the name come from eastern Germany, where "''Kräppel''" is a dialectical variant of "''Krapfen''". From the same source comes come the Silesian ''kręple'' (doughnuts) and the Jewish ''kreplach'' (meat-filled dumplings).
About a century after the Radziwiłł manuscript, Wojciech Wielądko translated a more recent cookbook into Polish, this time from French. The original book was ''La cuisinière bourgeoise'' by Menon. The titular "urban female cook" somehow changed both her gender and her estate in the Polish translation, becoming ''Kucharz doskonały'', or "the perfect male cook". In this translation, the word "''pączek''" was used to render the French "''beignet''", even though it usually referred to various kinds of fritters rather than doughnuts.
[[File:Pączki workowe.jpg|thumb|upright|Bag doughnuts as made by Maciej Barton, chef at Ostoja Chobienice]]
It would seem then that in the past the meaning of "''pączek''" was as broad as of the of French "''beignet''", encompassing a whole range of fried-dough foods, usually ball-shaped, and not just solely doughnuts. Among the many kinds of Old Polish ''pączki'' (typically aping the Wester ''Krapfen'' and ''beignets'') there were such creations as "bag doughnuts" (''pączki workowe'', made from balls of dough that were put into bags, cooked in boiling water and cut into slices that were then fried) or "syringe doughnuts" (''pączki strykowe'', made by squirting batter into boiling oil, possibly related to the funnel cakes of the Pennsylvania Dutch).
There's even a mid-19th-century recipe for ''beignets à la polonaise'' that you can find in ''La cuisine classique'' by Urbain Dubois and Émile Bernard, two French chefs who had worked for Polish and Russian aristocrats. But if you think that these "Polish-style ''beignets''" are the ''pączki'' we know from Poland today, then you're going to be disappointed. These are more like modern Polish "croquettes" made from filled and rolled-up ''crêpes'' (Polish ''naleśniki''), but sweet rather than savoury.