Who invented the beloved doughnut? A quick study on the origin of the sufgania. If you look it up in Wikipedia, you may get the impression that it was either the Dutch settlers in early New York or a guy name Hanson Gregory who invented the doughnut.
However, doughnuts — or pieces of dough fried in oil even those with holes in them — predated Dutch olykoeks by many thousands of years. Tags holiday cooking. Subscribe for our daily newsletter. Hot Opinion. Most Read.
Reporters' Tweets. About Us. Contact us. Advertise with Us. Terms Of Service. Privacy Policy. Subscriber Agreement. JPost Jobs. The Ring King Jr. It was Krispy Kreme's 60th birthday. In my own sixth or maybe seventh year, I remember stopping in at the green, red and white Krispy Kreme place in Alexandria, Virginia. There was a wide glass window behind the counter, and you could look in there at all those shiny conveyor belts and racks filled with fresh glazed doughnuts, and half swoon at the warmth and sweet vanilla richness of it all.
At the Smithsonian dedication, the Ring King was saluted as a milestone in American doughnut history. Then a singer, Cindy Hutchins, stepped up to the mike and drawing on the museum's archive of popular sheet music more than a million songs in all sang, "Who made the doughnut with the hole in the middle? Just how it got there will be always a riddle.
Well, yes and no. It is true that the humble doughnut does have a convoluted past that involves Dutch immigrants, Russian exiles, French bakers, Irving Berlin, Clark Gable and a certain number of Native Americans. And, yes, in its democratic ethos, its optimism, and its assorted origins, it does seem rather quintessentially American.
Of course doughnuts in some form or other have been around so long that archaeologists keep turning up fossilized bits of what look like doughnuts in the middens of prehistoric Native American settlements.
But the doughnut proper if that's the right word supposedly came to Manhattan then still New Amsterdam under the unappetizing Dutch name of olykoeks --"oily cakes. Fast-forward to the midth century and Elizabeth Gregory, a New England ship captain's mother who made a wicked deep-fried dough that cleverly used her son's spice cargo of nutmeg and cinnamon, along with lemon rind.
Some say she made it so son Hanson and his crew could store a pastry on long voyages, one that might help ward off scurvy and colds. In any case, Mrs. Gregory put hazelnuts or walnuts in the center, where the dough might not cook through, and in a literal-minded way called them doughnuts. Her son always claimed credit for something less than that: putting the hole in the doughnut. Some cynical doughnut historians maintain that Captain Gregory did it to stint on ingredients, others that he thought the hole might make the whole easier to digest.
Still others say that he gave the doughnut its shape when, needing to keep both hands on the wheel in a storm, he skewered one of his mom's doughnuts on a spoke of his ship's wheel.
In an interview with the Boston Post at the turn of the century, Captain Gregory tried to quell such rumors with his recollection of the moment 50 years before: using the top of a round tin pepper box, he said, he cut into the middle of a doughnut "the first doughnut hole ever seen by mortal eyes. One likes to think that less was more. But in fact doughnuts didn't come into their own until World War I, when millions of homesick American doughboys met millions of doughnuts in the trenches of France.
They were served up by women volunteers who even brought them to the front lines to give soldiers a tasty touch of home. When the doughboys came back from the war they had a natu-ral yen for more doughnuts. The name "doughboy," though, didn't derive from doughnuts. This month, KFC is rolling out its un holy fried chicken donut sandwich nationwide. Who knows what the next innovation will be? And as for the history of the doughnut, its true origin may never be determined.
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Are they British, Dutch, or American or all three? It's a holey tale. By Amanda Balagur February 18, Edit.
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