Merveilles

Merveilles are thin strips of fried sweet dough dusted with icing sugar, and they are sold as street food in Togo and Senegal. They are crunchy rather than soft, closer to a biscuit than a doughnut, and comparable to the fried pankere sold in Nigeria. The pastry is European in origin and travelled with colonisation. Its original name is Fasnachtschuechli in German-speaking Switzerland, and it appears in Italy as frittelle di carnevale, both carnival pastries eaten in the weeks before Lent. French speakers took the name merveilles, meaning wonders, and it is under that name that the pastry reached francophone West Africa. That it arrived from Europe does not make it any less genuinely a Togolese and Senegalese street food now. It is fried and sold locally, eaten locally, and made at home. What it is not is a dish with African origins, and the About says so rather than implying otherwise. Nutmeg in the dough is a small local touch. The source's method calls for yeast, which does not appear in its ingredient list, and no rise time is given, so the dough as written is unleavened.