Mad about Science: Donuts

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

There is an irreparable rift in our country. On either side of the aisle, voices are raised, fingers are pointed, insults are thrown. It’s doughnut! No, you fool, it’s a donut!

America’s favorite break room treat has a long history. Akin to apple pie, our country’s preferred fried confection doesn’t actually originate from the stars and stripes. There is a historical record of a donut-like stuffed cake that is fried and filled originating from the 1485 German cookbook, Küchenmeisterei, or Mastery of Cooking. However, the donut as we know it likely didn’t first appear until around the 1600s.

The pilgrims famously made a transatlantic voyage to America aboard the Mayflower in 1620. A lesser known detail of the pilgrim’s journey is that the group of religious separatists spent several years near Amsterdam before returning to England to board the Mayflower. During their stay in Leiden, they lived and worked with the Dutch, who taught them how to create olykoek, or “oil cake.”

Olykoek is considered to be the grandfather of the donut. It’s a ball of fried dough that’s stuffed with filling. In Amsterdam, olykoek was often filled with diced apples to create a handheld apple pie. It was common to soak the fruit in brandy for a full day before stuffing the dessert. These cakes are actually still produced in the Netherlands, but they’re largely viewed as a specialty baked item with recipes passed down from generation to generation and baker to baker.

Olykoek gained more prominence in the areas where Dutch settlers put down roots in North America in the 1700s. These cakes still appeared more as handheld pies or the jelly donuts we’d recognize today, as an efficient method for creating the donut ring had not yet been invented.

You may be wondering why we’ve been calling them “donuts” or “doughnuts,” when the logical etymological progression should have been “oil cakes” or “oily cakes.”

Well, as it turns out, most recipes may not have been written down very often for hundreds of years; or, if they were, they were quickly lost to time and the rigors of an active kitchen. 

One of the first instances of the doughnut being referred to as such appears to be a transcription of an oral recipe that described olykoek as “dow-nuts,” “dough nuts” and simply “nuts.”

There is a tremendous amount of speculation as to why these phrases were chosen. Due to the cakes being fried and left with a fruit filling center, they may have been crisp and crunchy like a nut but soft and doughy in the center. “Nut” was often used as a descriptor in English confectionery baking to describe a number of things, from actual nuts to a brown walnut-like appearance of a dessert. While we don’t know exactly why they came to be known as “doughnuts,” we do know that it was first transcribed by someone listening to someone else speak, likely without asking for clarification of the terminology.

Whether you’re in the “doughnut” or “donut” camp, you can stop pointing fingers at each other because you’re all wrong — it’s obviously “downut.”

Are you planning on really frustrating your friends and solidifying yourself in the group as the resident word nerd? In Scotland, they’re referred to as “doughrings,” while folks from Northern Ireland call them “gravy rings.”

Try stopping by the bakery and ordering a baker’s dozen of gravy rings. Go on, roll the dice and see what happens!

America’s obsession with donuts came to a head through a curious collision of events and cultures in 1917, amid the nation’s entry into the First World War. Soldiers fighting in the trenches endured some of the most vicious combat and deplorable conditions for weeks on end. Volunteers of the Salvation Army sought to alleviate the mental rigors of a seemingly unwinnable war by bringing a little taste of home to soldiers on the front lines. Equipped with gas masks, .45 caliber revolvers and a whole lot of dough, these women braved the horrors of trench warfare to bring freshly fried donuts to the boys at the front.

It’s believed that shortly after World War I, with the introduction of more affordable machinery used outside of lethal combat, the modern ring donut began to emerge in the United States. A special machine could grip dough, fry it and fling it onto a conveyor belt, which left a hole in the middle by the gripper. 

Rather than appearing as a defect, this became a novelty for American consumers and proved to be an effective way to hold the oily cake without getting grease all over their hands. These machines aren’t as commonplace outside of very large commercial bakeries anymore, yet the ring donut persists as a culinary staple that appears in offices all over the world.

As a final bit of donut-related trivia, President John F. Kennedy was once mistakenly quoted as saying:”I am a jelly donut,” or, directly, Ich bin ein Berliner. A Berliner is a form of jelly donut coated in powdered sugar that’s closely related to an olykoek. However, these confections are only referred to as a Berliner outside of Berlin. If JFK had instead said, Ich bin ein Pfannkuchen (a.k.a., “pancake”), this would be a very different discussion.

As soon as I can find a glutenfreier (“gluten-free”) Pfannkuchen that tastes wunderbar (c’mon, we all know that means “wonderful”), I’ll be all set.

Stay curious, 7B.