Donuts on My Mind

On a day when everyone is quoting the eloquent prose and poetry of John Updike (the brilliant author who died yesterday with more than 50 published books to his credit), I feel kinda bad quoting Homer Simpson…..but here goes:

“DONUTS!  Is there anything they can’t do?”

According to this morning’s New York Times, they even do great things when they’re stale.

I read Alex Witchel’s clever piece about how Eli Zabar – he of the New York City food emporium of the same name – makes bread pudding out of his famous jelly donuts. Witchel said  “when warm, it tasted like pie, a sweet fresh fruit pie, which left raspberry seeds in my teeth;” when cold “it tasted like ice cream.”

I haven’t been able to get jelly donuts out of my head all day.

It’s not that I eat donuts willy-nilly, mind you. In fact, I probably haven’t had one since the heydays of Krispie Kreme. (When the chain moved into San Diego it was my duty as a journalist to sample all the flavors and report on them. Tough job……..)

But reading about Zabar’s “tall, powder white and spotlight ready” jelly donuts really grabbed me.  I’ve spent the day reminiscing about the great donuts of my lifetime. The lemon-filled globes, caught in a blizzard of powered sugar, that my family got at Mrs. Foster’s Donuts in Lynn, Massachusetts after Mass on Sunday mornings. The slippery-with-grease “honey-dip” donuts at a hole-in-the-wall shop on Washington Street in Jamaica Plain. (Honey-dip is Bostonian for “glazed” donuts.)

Then there was the single best donut I ever ate.

This puff of perfection wasn’t actually called a donut, but rather krapfen, because I discovered it in the German-speaking part of Italy called the Sud-Tirol (South Tyrol). My husband and I were staying overnight with a half dozen friends at a tiny inn called Solerhof in the Grödnertal (Val Gardena in Italian; Gardena Valley in English). It was October and we were there for Törgellen.

One of the coolest traditions in the world, Törgellen means you stay in a little inn set in a meadow where cows with bells around their necks graze, and every young lady that passes by looks like Heidi. You go  hiking in a spectacular landscape all day long, then gather in the inn for an evening in front the a fire -- drinking young wine, feasting on just-picked chestnuts, speck (bacon) and local dishes, singing and yodeling (I’m not kidding); then collapsing into bed under a massive pouf of goosefeathers.

At Solerhof, the innkeeper went one better than other innkeepers in the area. When we arrived home from hiking in late afternoon, she greeted us with hot-from-the-fryer krapfen, each a masterpiece of yeastiness, tongue—tickling sugar, and warm preserves made of berries from the neighboring woods. It was like biting into a cloud. I ate several and felt a little guilty. Now, of course, I wish I had eaten a lot more.

The Solerhof building is still there tucked into woods at the end of a dirt road. But it’s just a family home now, no longer a gasthaus (guest house).

So, now I guess I’ll have to try Zabar’s jelly donuts the next time I’m in New York. And in the meantime, I’m going out to buy some jelly donuts this weekend and make the Jelly Doughnut Pudding of Eli Zabar.

Check out Witchel’s recipe. It’s impossible to go wrong with something that contains heavy cream, whole milk, sugar, eggs, vanilla and “14 jelly doughnuts, preferably filled with raspberry jam.”

Comments

[Alice Q. Foodie]

Wow Maureen - I'm pounding on my chest right now to get it restarted after reading that last sentence. Mein Gott! ;-)

[Maureen]

See? I told you.....this is a TOTALLY captivating concept...the jelly donut bread pudding. What are the chances I'll run into you tomorrow at a Winchell's donut shop?!?!?

[David Gray]

Mmmmm. I miss Ma Foster's donuts.