In the seventeenth-century (or the sixteenth or the nineteenth, depending on who's telling the story, for accuracy has never been in the nature of myth-making), Cäcilie Krapf was a cook in the court of the Habsburg royal family. One day, either out of anger at her husband or a wayward apprentice, Krapf took a piece of yeast dough in her hand and threw it at the offending party. They ducked and the dough flew dramatically over them, landing in a vat of sizzling hot fat. All was not lost, however. Out of this fit of matrimonial discord or workplace strife, the modern Krapfen -- a small, round yeast doughnut filled with apricot jam and baked floating in hot fat -- was born, with Krapf being the woman who gave it its name.
In reality, cooking lumps of dough in hot oil as a solution to hunger is a technique as old as time. In Europe, it goes back to the Romans at least, while the first record of Krapfen or something akin to it appears in German-language cookbooks around the year 1200. Originally something eaten by farmers as something fatty and filling after a hard day tilling the soil, it was in the nineteenth century that the Krapfen crossed the threshold and became a staple of city life in Vienna, beloved as it was by the Habsburgs who served rum-soaked or gold coin-studded versions of this once-rustic treat to their guests after long nights of drinking, dancing, and debauchery. A curious transformation indeed that what was once, in essence, a kind of poverty, lowest common denominator food became, in the hands of the aristocracy, a symbol of opulence, extravagance, and excess.
