1. The doughnut has existed
since the beginning of
time. So long those
archaeologists continue to
unearth fossilized bits of
what look like doughnuts
in the middens of
prehistoric Native
American settlements.
The doughnut, as we
know and love,
supposedly came to
Manhatten (then still New
Amsterdam) under the
Dutch name of olykoeks--
"oily cakes."
In early colonial times, US. Dutch immigrants discovered fried cake. So, the story goes, a
cow kicked a pot full of boiling oil over onto some pastry mix, thus inventing the golden
brown delight. Apparently, they didn't share this great discovery with their homeland
and the fried cakes became a staple in the harsh conditions that existed in the colony.
The Beginning of
Doughnut

2. Around 1847, Elizibeth Gregory, a New England ship captain's mother, made a deep-
fried dough that used her son's spice cargo of nutmeg, cinnamon, and lemon rind. She
made the deep fried cakes for son Hansen and his crew so they could store the pastry
on long voyages...and to help ward off scurvy and colds. Mrs. Gregory put hazel nuts or
walnuts in the center, where the dough might not cook through, and called them
doughnuts.
Hansen always took credit for the hole in the doughnut. Some doughnut historians think
that Hansen was a bit of a cheapskate and was just trying to save on food costs. Others
say that he gave the doughnut its first hole when, in the middle of a terrible storm and
in order to get both hands on the ships wheel, he crammed one of his mother’s fried
sensations onto one of the wooded spokes of the wheel. Yet another tale claims that he
decided, after a visit from an angel, that the doughy center of the fried cakes had to go.
Her son Hanson presented "his" creation to the people who apparently sang and danced
for days in praise of the best fried cake they had ever tasted. Is the doughnut heavenly
food? 17th century America thought so, but unfortunately Hanson was eventually burnt
at the stake for being a witch in the mid-19th century. Today, the town of Clam Cove,
Maine has a plaque in honor of Captain Hanson Gregory, the man who invented the
hole in the donut.
In the Middle of World War I, millions of homesick American "doughboys" were served
up countless doughnuts by women volunteers, trying to give the soldiers a taste of
home.
The first doughnut machine was invented in 1920, in New York City, by a man named
Adolph Levitt, a refugee from czarist Russia. Levitt's doughnut machine was a huge hit
causing doughnuts to spread like wildfire.
By 1934, at the World's Fair in Chicago, doughnuts were billed as "the hit food of the
Century of Progress". Seeing them made by machines "automatically" somehow made
them seem all the more futuristic.
Doughnuts became beloved. Legend says that dunking donuts first became a trend
when actress Mae Murray accidentally dropped a donut in her coffee one day at Lindy's
Deli on Broadway. In the 1934 film It Happened One Night newspaperman Clark Gable

3. teaches young runaway heiress Claudette Corbet how to "dunk". In 1937 a popular song
proclaimed that you can live on coffee and doughnuts if "you're in love".