doughnut, a small ring of sweet leavened dough that has been fried or sometimes baked. The term doughnut may also be used more broadly to refer to foods such as long johns, pączki, bear claws, crullers, and others that resemble doughnuts in form or composition—i.e., are either ring-shaped or composed of fried dough or both.
Cultures all over the world have been consuming fried dough for centuries. Traces of fried dough foods have been found in prehistoric Native American settlements, and sweetened fried doughs are known to have been eaten by the ancient Romans and Greeks. The history of the doughnut itself is generally traced to Dutch immigrants in 17th- and 18th-century New York, then New Netherland, who prepared fried dough balls called olie koeken or olykoeks, which means “oil cakes.” They were similar to modern doughnuts, although they did not yet have the iconic ring shape. Instead, the dough balls were stuffed with fruits and nuts in the middle, to work around the problem of the dough that otherwise would be at the centre of the ball cooking more slowly than the rest of the treat. These olykoeks were later described by writer Washington Irving in his 1809 book A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty as “balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, and called doughnuts, or olykoeks.”
Irving’s account is generally agreed to be the origin of the word doughnut in the United States, although there is some dispute about this. In 18th-century England, before his writing, the word nut was already being used to describe small round confections, such as ginger nuts and spice nuts. A recipe akin to the doughnut appears in The Country Housewife’s Family Companion by William Ellis, published in 1750. The recipe heading is “How to make Hertfordshire Cakes, Nuts, and Pincushions.” A recipe for “dow nuts” appears in The Receipt Book of Baroness Dimsdale, c. 1800 (2013; edited by Heather Falvey). Some historians posit that these recipes were brought from England by immigrants to America and could have been the catalyst for what became the modern doughnut rather than the Dutch olykoeks.
Regardless of how and where they started, doughnuts had been fully claimed by the United States by the turn of the 20th century. About 1850 an American sailor named Hanson Gregory is said to have innovated the iconic doughnut shape by piercing or cutting a hole through the centre of the treat, although these stories are now thought to be apocryphal. In one tale, he pierced a doughnut on a spoke of his ship’s wheel during a storm; in another, he cut out the hole using the lid of a tin pepper container. However the hole came to be, it was an important innovation; with the hole, doughnuts could be larger in size and still cook fully without leaving a doughy centre or requiring the addition of nuts or other fillings.
Doughnuts became an important part of life in the trenches during World War I (and later in World War II), where they were served to soldiers by female volunteers called “Doughnut Lassies.” The women had originally planned to bake pies or cakes but had found their equipment limited, especially near the front lines. Doughnuts, requiring little more than a pan or kettle of boiling oil in addition to the baking ingredients they had on hand, were relatively easy to prepare. Doughnuts continued to be associated with the war effort for those at home and the taste of home for those in the trenches. They grew increasingly popular after World War I was over, still craved by soldiers and veterans.
Adolph Levitt, a refugee from Russia, is often credited with creating the first doughnut machine, though some sources indicate others were already in existence. Levitt created his version to make doughnuts for theatre patrons who frequented his New York City bakery. Fresh doughnuts from an automated machine were a billed spectacle at the 1933–34 world’s fair as the “food hit of the Century of Progress.” In the following years the first Krispy Kreme doughnuts were sold by Vernon Rudolph. He originally rented a building to make the doughnuts and sell them to local shops in 1937, but so many passersby, intrigued by the smell wafting outward, stopped to ask if they could buy fresh doughnuts, leading him to cut a hole in an exterior wall in order to sell to customers on the street. Krispy Kreme stores later became known for their vast windows that allow customers to see the doughnuts being made and signs that light up when fresh doughnuts are available.
By the 1930s the Doughnut Corporation of America, founded by Levitt, had created the National Dunking Association as a gimmick to increase doughnut sales by encouraging people to dunk their doughnuts in coffee, tea, or milk, and the first Dunkin’ Donuts, known for both its coffee and its doughnuts, was opened in 1950. Doughnut shops large and small continued to boom in America and abroad throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, with innovations in flavours, textures, and ingredients leading to creations such as the doughnut hole (a small lump of fried dough), the Cronut (a croissantlike dough fried in a doughnut shape), and doughnut sandwiches.