By Isla Quinn
Round. Sugared. Filled with jam and fried in plenty of fat. It is the same pastry from the Baltic to the Alps, and almost every region has its own word for it.
The names
Start with what the sources agree on: it is a yeast dough, fried, filled with jam, with no hole in the middle. Then the words split.
According to Germanfoods.org, a trade-promotion site, “Krapfen” is used in the south, mainly Bavaria. “Kreppel” or “Kräppel” belong to Hesse and nearby areas. “Berliner” covers northern Germany, the Saarland and parts of western Baden-Württemberg. “Pfannkuchen” is used in Berlin and most eastern states, and, the site adds, elsewhere in Germany the same word means a pancake.
Wikipedia gives much the same map, with Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt and Saxony on the Pfannkuchen side, Austria with Bavaria on the Krapfen side, and Swabia’s Fasnetskiachla.
A Cologne bakery’s history page adds three local points. In Berlin, if you want a pancake you ask for an Eierkuchen. In parts of Bavaria, Austria and South Tyrol the carnival name is Faschingskrapfen. And in the Rhineland a Krapfen can be a different thing altogether, a choux-pastry ball with raisins eaten at carnival. In Aachen, the bakery says, the carnival word is Puffel.
Which name is right?
None of the sources says one is correct. The words follow the map. Our reading: if you are buying one on 31 December, use the word on the sign.
What goes inside
The classic filling is jam, and the jam changes with the region. The Cologne bakery lists red-fruit jams such as cherry, strawberry or raspberry in the north and west, apricot in Bavaria and Austria, plum butter (Pflaumenmus) in the east, and rosehip pulp in Baden and parts of the south. Germanfoods.org names rosehip jam or jelly as the traditional filling and powdered sugar as the dusting. The news site t-online names strawberry jam or plum butter, with apricot jam or apple sauce as alternatives.
All three mention fillings beyond fruit, among them cream and chocolate. Wikipedia says that in a classic Berlin Berliner the topping matches the filling, powdered sugar on plum butter and plain sugar on raspberry, strawberry or cherry, with sugar icing on the rest. It adds that today the filling is usually injected after frying.
Where the story starts
The sources give several beginnings, and they do not settle.
- A Berlin confectioner, unfit for military service, who became a regiment’s field baker and fried dough balls over an open fire, shaped like cannonballs. The Cologne bakery places this in the mid-eighteenth century in the time of Frederick the Great. t-online dates the legend to 1756. Wikipedia also calls it a legend.
- A Vienna court cook, Cäcilie Krapf, said to have made them at the end of the seventeenth century under the name Cillykugeln, according to the Cologne bakery.
- Fried yeast-dough balls from ancient Rome, dipped in honey, which the bakery calls a precursor.
- A recipe for jam-filled Krapfen in the Küchenmeisterei, a cookbook printed in Nuremberg in 1485, according to Wikipedia. It says it is unclear whether the book recorded existing practice or invented the filling.
Our reading: the 1485 recipe is the only one that points to a document, and it was printed more than two hundred years before the cannonball tale. The pages do not make that comparison themselves.
Why 31 December
t-online says many German families eat them on New Year’s Eve and that at midnight everyone gets one with jam. The Cologne bakery says they are traditionally eaten around midnight or earlier in the afternoon or evening. It suggests the habit may come from the fact that, until the early twentieth century, they were largely a festive pastry in many regions. Wikipedia says they were eaten on Silvester and during the carnival season. Germanfoods.org says they are sold year-round but most popular at carnival and Silvester.
The bakery also ties the carnival custom to the weeks before Lent, when milk, eggs and lard were used up before fasting. That is a religious calendar, and we mention it only because the source does.
The mustard joke
All four sources describe it. Someone fills a few doughnuts with mustard instead of jam and mixes them in with the others. t-online says some bakers sell mustard-filled ones on request at New Year’s. The Cologne bakery adds onions as an alternative. Wikipedia says the prank is especially common on 1 April. They all describe it as a joke, and none suggests the mustard version is sold as a pastry.
Side by side
- Berlin’s word: Pfannkuchen, according to Germanfoods.org; the Cologne bakery says Berliner, Pfannkuchen and Krapfen are the three most common names overall.
- Fillings in the east: plum butter (Cologne bakery, t-online); rosehip is the south’s (bakery) or “traditional” (Germanfoods.org).
- Cannonball story: mid-eighteenth century (bakery) against 1756 (t-online); a legend in each.
What kind of sources these are
A trade-promotion site, one bakery’s history page, a news and lifestyle site, and Wikipedia. The bakery and the trade site both promote baked goods. No food historian or archive source was reached, which is why the stories are shown as stories.
Questions a buyer would ask
Is a Krapfen the same as a Berliner? In most of the sources, yes: a regional name for the same filled yeast doughnut, though the Rhineland uses Krapfen for a different pastry, according to the bakery.
What is the traditional filling? There is no single one. The bakery’s list runs from red-fruit jam in the north and west to apricot in the south and plum butter in the east.
Do they keep? We found no source that says, so we do not say.
What we left out
Prices, recipes, bakery names, the fillings that contain alcohol, an icing variant that uses it, and Wikipedia’s remark that early fillings were often savoury.
Quick answers
What do Germans call a jam doughnut? According to Germanfoods.org, Krapfen in the south, Kräppel in Hesse, Berliner in the north, and Pfannkuchen in Berlin and most eastern states.
Why are Berliner eaten on New Year’s Eve? A Cologne bakery says they are traditionally eaten around midnight and that they were largely a festive pastry until the early twentieth century. No source gives a firm origin.
What is the mustard Berliner? According to t-online, a joke: some bakers sell mustard-filled ones on request, and a prankster mixes them among the jam ones.
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