Glazed Doughnuts

One tradition that continued among those women who mastered the earlier, less desirable flour and yeast, was doughnut-making. They mixed yeast doughs, then shaped them with a hole in the middle. An elderly Amish man remembers, “We’d have doughnuts at Christmastime or during butchering season when there was lard around. But I didn’t know anything of fastnachts because we didn’t keep Lent.” In that, the Amish stand in contrast to their neighboring Pennsylvania Germans who are from a higher church tradition. Those folks, on Shrove Tuesday, bake fastnachts (a doughnut without a center hole, that is fried in lard) in a symbolic effort to rid their homes of leavening agents, and to feast before Lent. A 40-year-old Amish woman fears that homemade doughnut-making may become a lost skill. “My mother made good doughnuts. She’d be asked to make the kind with holes in the middle for weddings. But now the young folks buy filled ones.”