'Oily Cakes'

The doughnut, that delicious breakfast treat millions of Americans enjoy every year, has been around longer than America itself; archaeologists have discovered doughnut remains at prehistoric ruins in the American Southwest. Nobody is quite sure how our doughnut-loving ancestors cooked them, or if they solved the doughnut quandary that has plagued mankind for centuries; how to make a doughnut that doesn’t have an undercooked center. It would take a few hundred years and a 16-year-old boy before the doughnut we know today was born.

Oily Cakes

It’s the Dutch that generally gets the credit for inventing the doughnut. Called olykoeks (or “oily cakes”), it was Pilgrims emigrating from Holland that brought the doughnut to America. The first donut started with a center filled with nuts or fruit to solve the not-fully-cooked-center problem.

The earliest known use of the word “doughnut” was by American author Washington Irving, who in his 1809 book “History of New York” described donuts as “balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat.”

Donuts at Sea

It wasn’t until 1847 that the doughnut took its now familiar shape. According to legend, Elizabeth Gregory of Camden Maine sent some donuts and her recipe to sea with her son Hanson. By all accounts, she had made her donuts in the traditional way, with nuts in the center. The story goes that during a storm at sea Hanson poked a hole through the center of one of his mother’s donuts to stick on the steering wheel. Knowing a good thing when he saw it, he had his cook begin to prepare donuts without a center.

The truth, however, is a little more ordinary. Interviewed in 1916, the 85-year-old Captain recounted his solution to the doughnut’s raw dough center. “I took the cover off the ship’s tin pepper box,” he said, “and I cut into the middle of that doughnut the first hole ever seen by mortal eyes!”

Sharing his revelation with his mother when he got back home, the young Gregory’s discovery spread from his mother’s kitchen to the rest of the world. “She made several panfulls and sent them down to Rockford, just outside Camden,” Captain Gregory recalled. “Everybody was delighted and they never made donuts any other way except the way I showed my mother.”

Donuts in War and Peace

By WWI donuts with a hole in the center were an American establishment. In 1920, Russian immigrant Adolph Levitt invented a machine to keep up with the doughnut demand at his bakery in New York City. The World’s Fair of 1934 declared the doughnut to be “the hit food of the Century of Progress.” Sales of Levitt’s doughnut-making machine were earning him upwards of $25 million a year.

Chain stores Dunkin Donuts and Krispy Kreme Donuts came along in the 1940s and 1950s. It was about this time that the doughnut transitioned from being sold as a treat in theatres to the breakfast food it is today.

Not only an American food, there are regional varieties of donuts in almost every corner of the globe. Donuts even have their own day; the first Friday of June is National Doughnut Day, begun in 1938 as a Salvation Army fundraiser to honor the women volunteers who served donuts to soldiers during WWI.

According to The Donut Book: The Whole Story in Words, Pictures & Outrageous Tales, Americans spend $2 billion to eat over 10 billion donuts every year. But it's our neighbors to the north that hold the title as the donut capital of the world - it's estimated in The Donut: A Canadian History, that there are 3200 donut stores in Canada supporting the claim that the Canadians boast the highest per capita consumption of donuts on the planet.

Captain Gregory died in 1921. Buried in Quincy, MA, on his tombstone, he is recognized by the National Association of American Bakers as the inventor of the doughnut hole.