donut facts

The History of the Donut

Sharing a powdered donut. The doughnut has existed since the beginning of time. So long that archaeologists continue to unearth fossilized bits of what look like doughnuts in the middens of prehistoric Native American settlements.

The doughnut, as we know and love, supposedly came to Manhatten (then still New Amsterdam) under the Dutch name of olykoeks--"oily cakes."

Dutch immigrants eating cake donuts. In early colonial times, US. Dutch immigrants discovered fried cake. So, the story goes, a cow kicked a pot full of boiling oil over onto some pastry mix, thus inventing the golden brown delight. Apparently, they didn't share this great discovery with their homeland and the fried cakes became a staple in the harsh conditions that existed in the colony.

Around 1847, Elizabeth Gregory, a New England ship captain's mother, made a deep-fried dough that used her son's spice cargo of nutmeg, cinnamon, and lemon rind. She made the deep fried cakes for son Hansen and his crew so they could store the pastry on long voyages...and to help ward off scurvy and colds. Mrs. Gregory put hazel nuts or walnuts in the center, where the dough might not cook through, and called them doughnuts.

Hansen always took credit for the hole in the doughnut. Some doughnut historians think that Hansen was a bit of a cheapskate and was just trying to save on food costs. Others say that he gave the doughnut its first hole when, in the middle of a terrible storm and in order to get both hands on the ships wheel, he crammed one of his mothers fried sensations onto one of the wooded spokes of the wheel. Yet another tale claims that he decided, after a visit from an angel, that the doughy center of the fried cakes had to go.

Doughboys grabbing a cinnamon suprise in between battles. Her son Hanson presented "his" creation to the people who apparently sang and danced for days in praise of the best fried cake they had ever tasted. Is the doughnut heavenly food? 17th century America thought so, but unfortunately Hanson was eventually burnt at the stake for being a witch in the mid-19th century. Today, the town of Clam Cove, Maine has a plaque in honour of Captain Hanson Gregory, the man who invented the hole in the donut.

In the Middle of World War I, millions of homesick American "doughboys" were served up countless doughnuts by women volunteers, trying to give the soldiers a taste of home.

The first doughnut machine was invented in 1920, in New York City, by a man named Adolph Levitt, a refugee from czarist Russia. Levitt's doughnut machine was a huge hit causing doughnuts to spread like wildfire.

Donuts at the Worlds Fair in 1934.

By 1934, at the World's Fair in Chicago, doughnuts were billed as "the hit food of the Century of Progress". Seeing them made by machines "automatically" somehow made them seem all the more futuristic.

Doughnuts became beloved. Legend says that dunking donuts first became a trend when actress Mae Murray accidentally dropped a donut in her coffee one day at Lindy's Deli on Broadway. In the 1934 film It Happened One Night newspaperman Clark Gable teaches young runaway heiress Claudette Corbet how to "dunk". In 1937 a popular song proclaimed that you can live on coffee and doughnuts if "you're in love".

During World War II, Red Cross women, known as Doughnut Dollies passed out hot doughnuts to the hard fighting soldiers.

Here's some donut trivia to tuck away for sharing over
a cup of coffee and a donut, of course.

On one of his expeditions, Admiral Richard Byrd, a noted donut-lover, took along 100 barrels of donut flour, enough for two years' worth of donuts.

Some economists claim that you can judge the health of the economy by looking at the size of the hole in a donut. When times are good, more dough is used - hence, the hole is smaller.

The largest doughnut ever made was an American-style jelly doughnut weighing 1.7 tons (3739 lbs), which was 4.9 m (16 ft) in diameter and 40.6 (16in) high in the center. It was made in Utica, New York, USA on January 21, 1993

Ernest Hemingway included donuts in a story called "The Mercenaries." And Gertrude Stein used "the hole in the donut" to metaphorically describe the inner beings of people.

Legend has it that dunking donuts first became a trend when actress Mae Murray accidentally dropped a donut into her coffee while dining at Lindy's Deli on Broadway in New York City.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the record for donut eating is held by a man named John Haight, who consumed 52 ounces of donuts (about 26 average donuts - or 20 Tom and Son's donuts) in just over six minutes in 1981.