page_title: Doughnut
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: Doughnut / History / Origins
caption_attribution_description: Krispy Kreme doughnuts being made at the Krispy Kreme restaurant at Kingsford Smith Airport, Sydney, Australia.
context_page_description: A doughnut or donut is a type of fried dough confection or dessert food. The doughnut is popular in many countries and is prepared in various forms as a sweet snack that can be homemade or purchased in bakeries, supermarkets, food stalls, and franchised specialty vendors.
  Doughnuts are usually deep fried from a flour dough, and typically either ring-shaped or a number of shapes without a hole, and often filled, but can also be ball-shaped. Other types of batters can also be used, and various toppings and flavorings are used for different types, such as sugar, chocolate, or maple glazing. Doughnuts may also include water, leavening, eggs, milk, sugar, oil, shortening, and natural or artificial flavors.
  The two most common types are the ring doughnut and the filled doughnut, which is injected with fruit preserves, cream, custard, or other sweet fillings. Alternatively, small pieces of dough are sometimes cooked as doughnut holes. Once fried, doughnuts may be glazed with a sugar icing, spread with icing or chocolate on top, or topped with powdered sugar, cinnamon, sprinkles or fruit. Other shapes include rings, balls, flattened spheres, twists, and other forms.
context_section_description: The earliest origins to the modern doughnuts are generally traced back to the olykoek ("oil(y) cake") Dutch settlers brought with them to early New York (or New Amsterdam). These doughnuts closely resembled later ones but did not yet have their current ring shape. One of the earliest mentions of "doughnut" was in Washington Irving's 1809 book A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty:
  Sometimes the table was graced with immense apple-pies, or saucers full of preserved peaches and pears; but it was always sure to boast of an enormous dish of balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, and called dough-nuts, or oly koeks: a delicious kind of cake, at present scarce known in this city, excepting in genuine Dutch families.
  The name oly koeks was almost certainly related to the oliekoek: a Dutch delicacy of "sweetened cake fried in fat."
  According to anthropologist Paul R. Mullins, the first cookbook mentioning doughnuts was an 1803 English volume which included doughnuts in an appendix of American recipes. He also traces its origins to the oliekoek that arrived in America with the Dutch settlers in the early 18th century. By the mid-19th century, the doughnut looked and tasted like today's doughnut, and was viewed as a thoroughly American food.
  Hanson Gregory, an American, claimed to have invented the ring-shaped doughnut in 1847 aboard a lime-trading ship when he was 16 years old. Gregory was dissatisfied with the greasiness of doughnuts twisted into various shapes and with the raw center of regular doughnuts. He claimed to have punched a hole in the center of dough with the ship's tin pepper box, and to have later taught the technique to his mother. Smithsonian Magazine states that his mother, Elizabeth Gregory, "made a wicked deep-fried dough that cleverly used her son's spice cargo of nutmeg and cinnamon, along with lemon rind," and "put hazelnuts or walnuts in the center, where the dough might not cook through", and called the food 'doughnuts'.
  Another theory on their origin came to light in 2013, when a recipe for "dow nuts" was found in a book of recipes and domestic tips written around 1800 by the wife of Baron Thomas Dimsdale, the recipe being given to the dowager Baroness by an acquaintance who transcribed for her the cooking instructions for a "dow nut".
caption: Glazed doughnuts rolling on a conveyor belt at a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop
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