пышки

Pyshki are fried rings of yeasted dough, closer to a classic doughnut shape than the ball-shaped ponchiki, eaten with powdered sugar and a glass of tea or coffee with condensed milk. The word comes from pyshny (пышный), meaning fluffy, puffed, or lush, itself derived from the verb pykhat' (пыхать), meaning to puff, breathe out, or emit steam. A pyshka is therefore, at root, a thing that puffs up.

The most famous pyshki in Russia come from a single address: the Pyshechnaya on Bolshaya Konyushennaya Street in St. Petersburg, opened in 1958 during the Khrushchev era and never closed since. The shop has no chairs, only a long counter, and the fryers have been running on the same schedule for more than sixty years. Locals and tourists stand shoulder to shoulder, eating pyshki dusted in powdered sugar while the windows fog over with condensation.

Before the Bolshaya Konyushennaya shop became iconic, pyshki were a standard output of Soviet city bakeries alongside ponchiki and pretzels. The ring shape distinguished them from ponchiki and allowed them to fry more evenly, the hole letting heat circulate through the center. Soviet bakers standardized the weight and sugar content, and the form changed little across the country.

The Pyshechnaya survived the 1990s transition and the flood of Western fast food chains that followed, partly because of price and partly because the ritual of eating there felt irreplaceable. In 2011, a renovation proposal set off a minor public outcry, and the shop was left essentially unchanged. Food writers from Moscow and abroad have called it one of the last unaltered Soviet food spaces in Russia.