Evening public ledger. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1914-1942, 1915-12-27
Tom Daly's Column
Lines That Have Been Suggesting Them
selves Each Morning Lately Between
and O o'CIock


and 8 O'clock
We never thought that tve tcouid Get
An iron-toorker's job, and yet
When to this column's top zoe 90
Each morning to get busv
We dare not vieio the space beloto,
For fear Of orotoinG disSy.
So, upon this morning after, we naturally
rejoice to find here convenient to our hand
this long. safe and more or less ornate ladder
provided by thoughtful contrib:
Why the Cruller7
"Whv is the cruer mscalled a douehnlIt IN
Philadelphia? b. w C. demands 10 know
Rather, I should say, why Is the doughnut--
that unmistakable and distinctive genus OF
doughnut which surrounds a circular air space
-mscaled a cruller? In half dozen we'll
known Philadelphia pastry emporiums I have
been simplify informed that doughnut was not
n doughnut, nay, that on the contrary to wit,
douEhnut a cruller.
Coming OF New England stock my earliest
memory dates back TO the doughnut with hole
in 1t. Not that gainsay the round, compact,
holeless doughnut. There have long been such
and stlll are such In some New England homes
where the culinary arts have followed drab and
unimaginative forms. Webster, I confess did
not mention the hole in the doughnut, There
is hasty supercilious brevity in his definitions
a small cake, usually sweetened often made
with yeast and fried in deep fat. Nor do find
any mention of the hole in the doughnut In the
Century Dictionary's amplined definition
"1 will not take the positive stand that the
doughnut, per Sc, must have n hole in Il. 1
have documentary proof that my great great
grandmother made them that way and
down the generations. When I first came to
sit at breakfast with the grown folks the ap
proved and traditional New England doughnut
there. One of my earliest memories deals
with the twlrllng of doughnut my thumb
and of my deprivation of said doughnut for such
unseemly conduct. Aunts, uncles, cousins
casionally visited did not deprive the doughnut
of its manifest right to surround an aperture of
air space, as round an air space as may be con-
trived either by the aid OF a doughnut form
punch or else by the simpler device of twisting
a strip of dough round the thumb.
Have YOU ever seen doughnuts strung on
cane and bartered to urchins for a penny each?
l have. In Boston, in Providence in Bangor
Maine; yes, and in the sordid precincts of
Wall street, New York. Has any anywhere
ever seen crullers strung a cane? Never.
Coming to crullers, find there need not be the
slightest occasion for controversy or quibbe.
CRULLER is Immediately derived from the Old
Dutch noun KRULLER. who curls. And
there was back of that the Middle Dutch verb
kRULLEN to curl. Manfestly cruller must
he curled or crued. There is that old line I !
dimly, All day she crued the crisp |
and crumbling cruller.' And yet your Philade- |
pha pastry purveyors will insist that the sacred
hoed and hallowed doughnut Is a cruller and,
vice versa, that an unequvocably crulled cruer |
Is doughnut.
why this bootless perversity in the cradle of
the naton?"
What do you make of this, gentle reader? |
What says Washington Irving in THE
Legend of Sleepy Hollow? This is 1t: "Such
leaped-up platters OF cakes of various and
almost lndescribable kinds, known only to
experienced Dutch housewives! There was
he doughty doughnut the tenderer oily koell,
and the crisp and crumbng cruller, etc"
Miss Della Leeper than whom there are no
finer girls, has made her mark in Kecksburg.