Who Invented Doughnuts?

Doughnuts have been around in some form for thousands of years, but a lot had to happen to make them the near-ubiquitous snack they are today. Learn about the history of doughnuts in this episode of BrainStuff, based on these articles: https://recipes.howstuffworks.com/5-things-didn-t-know-about-doughnuts.htm; https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-events/ridiculous-history-vitamin-donuts.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren vogelbaumb Here. Donuts aren't just the best way to
get on the good side of your friends or coworkers
or mechanic or pretty much anyone else. These snacks also
have a storied past that goes back thousands of years

(00:22):
to get to the tasty toroid we know today. There are,
of course, two main categories of donuts, yeast raised and
cake donuts. Yeast raised are the fluffy airy types that
get that fluffiness from yes yeast and are sometimes filled
with jelly cream or other stuff. Cake types are denser

(00:44):
and get their tender texture from being raised with chemical
leveners like baking powder. Both are fried in oil because
that's a great way to make things delicious. We didn't
really figure out chemical leveners until the eighteen hundreds, but
phrased breads go back five thousand years or more. People
in various parts of the world developed them in tandem

(01:06):
with beer brewing. The same types of yeast make both
beer and bread bubbly, and some of those early breads
were sweetened, and sometimes the dough was fried in oil
instead of being baked, so by the end of the
Middle Ages around the fifteen hundreds, cultures certainly throughout Europe

(01:27):
had rich traditions of frying balls or rings of sweet
dough in oil or lard. Because both sweeteners and fats
were expensive at the time, these were often treats reserved
for holidays like Christmas, Hanukkah or Carnival. Dutch colonists brought
the tradition with them to North America in the sixteen hundreds.

(01:48):
Their term for them was oily cook, meaning literally oily cake.
We might have gotten the word doughnut from England in
the mid seventeen hundreds, recipes appearing for nuts a fried
dough meaning small lumps, and a food historian recently found
a book of recipes and household management tips written in

(02:10):
eighteen hundred by a baroness in Hertfordshire, England, which included
a recipe for a dough nut, which called for a
yeast raised mixture of flour, sugar, butter, eggs, and nutmeg
to be fried in pork lard. Interestingly, there was also
a Polish Yiddish word for similar treats doughnuts, though those
were fried in oil or schmaltz. In the mid eighteen hundreds,

(02:35):
a woman from Maine by the name of Elizabeth Gregory
deep fried some dough for her son Hanson, who was
a sea captain, to take on his voyages. She put
nuts in the center of the pastry and created a
literal doughnut. A probably apocryphal story says the captain Gregory
made the first doughnut hole when he spiked one of
his mother's fried pastries on a spoke of his ship's wheel,

(02:56):
allowing him to keep his hands free to steer. But really,
making donuts ring shaped just makes sense. Deep frying is
a hot and quick process. If you fry a solid
circle of dough, it's likely to burn on the edges
before the center cooks through. Adding a hole gives you
more surface area, thus letting the resulting ring cook through

(03:18):
at an even rate. By the way, the donut holes
that you can buy today are made separately, as doughnut
machinery creates rings, not solid circles that need to have
a hole punched out. Those ring machines have been in
use since the nineteen twenties. During World War One, Salvation
Army volunteers nicknamed doughnut lassies, fried and served donuts to

(03:41):
American soldiers in France. This cemented the snack's image is
a wholesome slice of home. But the dough boy, nicknamed
for World War One soldiers, had nothing to do with donuts.
It might have come from the early Mexican War of
eighteen forty six to eighteen forty eight, when American soldiers
were covered in dust on their track, giving the appearance

(04:01):
that they were covered in flour. In the early nineteen forties,
the Donut Corporation of America, the biggest donut maker of
the time, A, tried pushing a product called vitamin donuts, Yes,
vitamin donuts A. Marketing food products as enriched with synthesized
vitamins was and still is a popular trend, and the

(04:23):
company tried jumping on the bandwagon. They hit a legal
snag as the donuts themselves weren't vitamin enriched, just the
flour that they were made with, so they had to
switch to marketing their product as just donuts. During World
War Two, volunteers from the Red Cross, this time again
served donuts to soldiers at war. It created enough nostalgia

(04:47):
that many a returning veteran opened up a donut shop
and that perhaps is how cops began hanging out in
donut shops. In the nineteen fifties, more police officers began
patrolling in cars, and they needed somewhere to park and
do paperwork during their night beats. Donut shops had started
to proliferate at the same time and were often open

(05:08):
at three or four am to make fresh pastries and
coffee for the day. The shops provided a place to
stop and get a snack. Furthermore, the shop owners liked
having cops around for protection. In the book Donut History,
Recipes and Lore from Boston to Berlin, the former mayor
and police chief of Philadelphia, Frank Rizzo, is quoted as saying,

(05:29):
when I was a cop, even though I had breakfast
at home, there was nothing I liked better than a big,
thick donut and a cup of coffee. You got out there,
walked around, rolled in the streets at the criminals, and
burned the calories off. These days, about ten billion donuts
are made every year in the United States alone, and
if you're mathematically minded, you can calculate the volume of

(05:51):
any or all of them, as long as you get
a few base measurements. A few years back, a mathematician
by the name of Eugenia Chang published an eighteen page
note explaining the equations necessary to figure out how much
dough goes into a donut, how much sugar you'd need
to code it, and even the ratio of squidgy interior
to crispy exterior on any given pastry. To close us

(06:13):
out today, here's a quote from her conclusions, which I
think is pretty solid. If you are me, then it's
easy to get carried away messing around with calculus. Go
ahead and eat your donuts however you like them. Today's
episode is based on the article five Things you Didn't
Know about donuts on how Stuffworks dot com, written by

(06:36):
Katherine Whitburn. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership
with how Stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler
Klang and Ramsey Young. Four more podcasts my heart Radio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows. Y