About Fried Pastries

Appears in

Published 1994

About

To the delight of children all over the world, homemakers break off small pieces of dough, drop them into sizzling hot fat, fry them to a crisp golden frizzle, drain them and sprinkle the crusty morsels with a snowdrift of confectioners’ sugar. Made with bread dough or cream puff dough, these fried pastries are universal. Call them what you like, these loops, twists or puffs of fried dough are essentially the same:

chrustchiki (loops; Poland)
fritelle (puffs or strips; Italy)
crostoli (flat strips; Friuli, Alto Adige and throughout the Veneto in Italy)
bugie (“rags”; Piedmont region, Italy)
zacarelle (“strips of paper”; Abruzzo, Italy)
zeppoli (served on the feast day, San Giuseppe, on March 19th; Naples, Italy)
guanti (“gloves”; Naples, called wandi in Rhode Island’s Italian-American community)
sfingi (Sicily)
heizenblozen (Yiddish, from Eastern Europe)