HOLE TRUTH ON ORIGIN OF DOUGHNUTS (2024)

With doughnuts, it’s all about the hole. No hole, no doughnut. That little circle of nothing means everything. Otherwise, it’s a cruller, or a Bismarck, or a beignet, or a churro, or any of those words that mean a fried piece of dough.

The idea of frying a chunk of dough is ancient. The Romans did it. So did just about every other long-lived European culture, from the Dutch to the Spanish to the Germans.

But the story of that little hole in the center of a round doughnut is quintessentially American. It started with a 19th century Maine teenager.

A century and a half after 15-year-old Hanson Crockett Gregory of Clam Cove, Maine, punched a hole in what he called “greasy sinkers,” we are scarfing down doughnuts.

Thanks in part to the waning popularity of bagels (another roll with a hole), doughnut sales have been rising faster than yeast dough in a warm room. Sales since 1994 have jumped from $6.5 billion to $8.5 billion and are expected to hit nearly $9 billion this year, according to Business Trend Analysts of Commack, N.J.

Pumping up this carbo overload is the phenomenal success of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Based in Winston-Salem, N.C., the 65-year-old company achieved iconic status in the South for its hot, glazed, yeast-raised doughnuts. It began expanding outside the South about five years ago. The price of Krispy Kreme stock soared; doughnut shops everywhere basked in the newfound interest and sales increased.

All of which brings us back to the hole truth. Food historian John Mariani believes it was the Pennsylvania Dutch from Germany who were the first to make doughnuts with holes for dunking in coffee, but the evidence remains murky. Or, perhaps, it just isn’t as colorful as the story about the young sea captain from Maine.

The year was 1847. According to family lore, Gregory, the teenage scion of a prosperous Maine shipping family, asked his mother why her fried cakes were so soggy in the middle. She said she didn’t know; the centers just wouldn’t cook through. So, on an impulse, her son took a fork and punched out the center of a couple uncooked rounds of dough. Here, Mom, fry these. And the all-American doughnut with the hole was born.

Or not. That very same kid, when he turned 19, became Maine’s youngest sea captain. During his sea travels, there were tales that the doughnut was invented when he jammed one of his mother’s cakes on the spoke of the ship’s wheel during a storm. Or that he lightened the cakes with a hole after six men fell overboard and sank to the bottom because of the heavy, fried (holeless) cakes they had eaten.

Gregory himself, in an interview around the turn of the century in the Boston Post, gave yet another version, according to The Donut Book (Knopf, 1987), by Sally Levitt Steinberg. He said that in 1847 he was on a schooner eating tough, greasy fried cakes and had used the round cover of the ship’s tin pepper box to cut a hole in the middle of the “greasy sinkers.”

It was the 1940s, however, that saw a real doughnut hole frenzy, says Ellen Dyer, archivist at Camden’s public library. “The whole doughnut thing went crazy,” she says. The 1940 World’s Fair had a doughnut exhibit and in 1941 the American Donut Corp. sponsored the Great Donut Debate in New York City. The subject of the debate: “Who Put the Hole in the Doughnut?”

Fred Crockett, who lives in Rockport, Maine, not far from the bronze plaque honoring his ancestor, is 91 and still starts each day with coffee and a plain cake doughnut. He also takes sharp exception to any theory about the origin of doughnut holes but the one his relatives told him about Gregory and his mother. “When she told him the centers don’t cook up, he just walked across the floor of the kitchen and stuck a fork through the dough. The rest are just crazy stories,” he says.