An American legend is born: the Doughnut
Doughnut shops are a dime a dozen these days and they’re sold in mass-produced quantities in just about every convenience store or establishment with anything barely reminiscent of a bakery. Let’s take a sweet trip down memory lane back to the dawn of what has become an American icon: the doughnut.
Back in the mid-1800s, doughnuts were known by the Dutch word olykoeks, or “oily cakes.” They were literally balls of dough fried in pork fat. The legendary doughnut truly gets its start because of a woman named Elizabeth Gregory. Elizabeth had a mean recipe for a sweet fried dough that her son loved. He was a ship captain, and he would bring her spices such as nutmeg and cinnamon, which she used to flavor her famous little fritters. Elizabeth made batches of the pastries so her son and his crew had something sweet to savor while spending a long time at sea. She placed a nut in the center of the dough ball, like a hazelnut, hence the name “doughnuts.”
But where did doughnuts get their holes? Much lore surrounds the first doughnut with a hole. Some think the Captain Gregory skewered the pastry on a spoke of the ship’s wheel in order to steer better whilst enjoying a snack. However, according to Gregory himself, the first doughnut actually got its hole when he cut the center out of one of the pastries with a small round metal can to remove the nut. And then the doughnut hole was born.
Fast forward a few years and doughnuts were even served to soldiers during World War I to give the men overseas a taste of home. This is when these little sticky, sweet legends really started to come into their own.
Once the 1920s rolled around, oily cakes were being mass-produced and the first mass-production doughnut-making machine was created. The sugary confections were just now becoming associated with breakfast foods, but were still regarded as a popular snack food in movie theaters.
By the 1940s and ‘50s, familiar brands such as Dunkin’ Donuts and Krispy Kreme were starting to pop up. Coincidentally, the bagel was also coming into existence at this time. The doughnut’s popularity wavered, but only for a brief moment in time. People called doughnuts an unhealthy alternative to bagels and cream cheese, but really – who’s to argue that either are necessarily a low-calorie health food?
Next time you bite into a fresh-off-the-press donut and it melts in your mouth, think of that sea captain, sailing along, enjoying one of his mother’s sugary treats of sweet fried dough and thank him for helping invent one of America’s most celebrated food pastimes.
Let’s make some dough! ?
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