By Michal Szczepaniak
Fat Tuesday, commonly known as pączki day, is a Polish Catholic celebration on the day before lent. Pączki were created to use any ingredients that the family wouldn't be able to eat during lenten fasting, like milk, eggs, sugar or fruit. They're tasty polish pastries made with different fruit or cream fillings.
Polish Club Zagłoba celebrated Fat Tuesday this week with their annual pączki sale at the Illini Union. Henry Borsuk is the president of the organization. He says he likes to share his polish culture with people who may not know much about it.
Borsuk explains, "When other cultural clubs are selling stuff on campus, I always try their food, because it's really - it's really interesting to try new things. They're sharing their culture with me and I can see on their faces it brings them great joy. It's the same way it brings me great joy sharing my culture with others."
Customers here had three flavors to choose from: raspberry, bavarian cream and rose. In local bakeries in Chicago, they can sell up to 10 thousand pączki on Fat Tuesday alone. Dominika Sarna says she has been enjoying pączki from local Chicago bakeries for as long as she can remember. She says she was excited to see that she could still buy her favorite pastries here on campus.
"I get to eat pączki even when I'm away from home," she says. "Although they're not my mom's homemade ones, they still taste really, really good."
Sarna says that though she wasn't there for fat Tuesday this year, she looks forward to baking some homemade paczki next time she's home.
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