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The History of the Donut

Doughnuts as we know them today originated in the mid-1800s. Their predecessor was the olykoek, a treat Dutch immigrants to the U.S. made by frying the leftover bits of bread dough in hot oil. Exactly how the name “doughnut” came to be used is the subject of some disagreement. According to some sources, the Dutch twisted their dough into knots, hence “dough knots”. Others point out that the olykoeken tended not to cook through in the very middle, so some makers would put nuts in the center (“dough-nuts”) to make them more palatable.

The uncooked centers seem to have been, directly or indirectly, the reason behind the hole. According to several widely diverging accounts, the doughnut hole was the invention of a New England sea captain named Hanson Gregory, around 1847. Gregory’s mother Elizabeth made olykoeken and sent them with her son on his journeys to sea. The most popular version of the story, is that Gregory needed a place to put his olykoek while he steered the boat, so he impaled it on one of the spokes of the steering wheel. Other sources say that he simply didn’t like the uncooked centers (or the nuts his mother filled them with) and poked them out; still others say he may have encountered a cake with a hole in the middle during his journeys and decided to adapt the idea to the olykoeken. Whatever Gregory’s real reason for adding the hole, it had the beneficial effect of making the doughnuts cook more evenly, and the idea quickly caught on.

Nearly thirty years later, in 1872, John Blondell received the first patent for a doughnut cutter. Doughnut technology advanced significantly over the next few decades. By the 1930s, automated doughnut-making machines were producing the treats in huge quantities. And in the 1940s and 1950s, chains like Krispy Kreme and Dunkin’ Donuts sprang up, taking mass-produced doughnuts to the masses.

Recently, however, archaeologists have found petrified fried cakes with holes in them in the south-western U.S. in prehistoric Native American ruins. So maybe doughnuts have been around longer than we think!