Beignets are one of those unusual foodstuffs that are on the one hand wildly popular in their birthplace, even going so far as being part of its sense of identity and tradition, but despite this having for some reason never quite made it beyond state or county lines.

For at least the past 165 years they have been virtually synonymous with the city of New Orleans, a must-try on the tick-list of every visiting traveller, and a genuine punctuation in the day of many New Orleanians. But for whatever reason, beignets simply haven’t spread to other regions or countries. Of course, this also means that they haven’t been adopted and then bastardised, deconstructed and reconstructed, gone viral and then become passé and finally been rediscovered. None of that. Those little squares of fried dough, sitting under icing sugar and alongside a cup of coffee, have stayed in exactly the same format and exactly the same context that they would have been found in at their inception.

There is little that will get in the way of New Orleanians and their beignets

There is little that will get in the way of New Orleanians and their beignets

If you don’t see them outside the Big Easy, when you step into the French quarter of New Orleans, you can’t move for the things. Clouds of icing sugar chase you down Decatur Street, the smell of frying loiters on corners and boxes of beignet mix flank shop fronts. Café du Monde, the oldest and most famous of the........

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