Donuts

A warm, fresh, soft Donut, easily pulling apart and melting in your mouth, the cinnamon glaze on it crumbling onto your tongue. It’s a comfort food like no other. Normally cooked with milk, yeast, granulated sugar, eggs, butter, all-purpose flour, vegetable oil, salt, vanilla extract, and nutmeg, it’s a favourite of Americans and many people all over the globe. The two main varieties are ring and filled Donuts, with Donut holes also offering much excitement among consumers. If not cinnamon, donuts are commonly topped with sugar, different types of chocolates, fruits, jams, or other complementary flavours.

The origins of this dessert masquerading as a snack are naturally complicated. Should it be traced back to when dough was fried? Or when a hole was made in dough? For instance, the ancient Greeks and Romans fried cakes and topped them with honey, in one way a predecessor of the Donut as we know it today. The Arabs also fried dough blobs, then dipping them in sugar syrup to sweeten them. And of course in India, there’s the Gulab Jamun.

While theories abound, Donuts have traditionally been traced back to the Dutch. When Dutch immigrants came to New Amsterdam (now New York City), they carried along their food culture with them. Among the recipes they brought was Olykoeks (oily cakes) or Oliebollen (oil balls), which included frying dough in pork fat. The 1809 book A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty by Washington Irving mentions “balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, and called doughnuts, or olykoeks.”

Other food historians believe the Donut descended from the British or German fried dough traditions. But the distinctly American snack may have come around only in the 1800s. The story goes that in 1847 an American sailor called Hanson Gregory claimed to have come up with the idea. He said that Donuts then were just balls of dough, which were crispy on the outside and raw at the centre. At age 16, he had the idea of removing the middle entirely, to eliminate this issue. As he told The Washington Post in a later interview, with a tin pepper box lid he “cut into the middle of that Donut the first hole ever seen by mortal eyes”. He showed this to his mother and her ring Donuts quickly became a sensation.

Although the snack was around for a while, it was during World War I that its popularity exploded. The Salvation Army had sent 250 volunteers to provide snacks and supplies to US troops in France. These volunteers had planned to bake cakes and pies, but ovens were hard to access. They did have pans though, which could be heated over fires, and switching over to Donuts was the obvious answer. They reportedly rolled out dough with bottles and shell casings. Cut Donuts with empty baking powder cans. And made holes using a broken coffee maker. These women came to be known as Doughnut Lassies. After the war, the snack’s place in the country’s consciousness was cemented.

Today, commercialisation has made this distinctly American snack a favourite the world over, with different brands exploring its versatility. In India, on special occasions, one can also find Jalebi and Kaju Katli Donuts!