Letters from the strange corners

The doughnut came first. Dutch settlers brought olykoeks, “oily cakes,” to New York in the 1600s; Anna Joralemon was running an olykoek shop there by 1673. Round fried dough. No hole.

The hole shows up around 1847, and the man who took credit told the story himself. In 1916, at 85, Hanson Crockett Gregory, a Maine sea captain, told the Washington Post he cut the center out with the lid of the ship's tin pepper box. His mother's doughnuts, he said, fried fine at the edges and stayed raw in the middle. “I cut into the middle of that doughnut the first hole ever seen by mortal eyes!” He compared himself to Columbus.

Here is what gets me: Gregory told three versions of that night. Indigestion, in the Post. A storm, where he jammed the doughnut onto a spoke of the ship's wheel to free both hands. Penny-pinching, where a tin cutter replaced the walnuts his mother stuffed into the middle. Same man, same hole, three motives. At most one is true.

The mechanism is the only part everyone agrees on, and it is real. Heat crawls into dough from the outside, and the time it needs to reach a point grows with the square of the distance. A solid cake has a center far from any surface, so it lags: raw inside, overdone out. A ring has no such point. Every crumb sits near hot oil. That is why the hole works.

In 1941 the National Dunkers Association met at the Astor Hotel in New York to settle the question. They voted. Gregory beat a story about an arrow accidentally piercing a frying cake, two thirds to one. An official ruling, by ballot, on something nobody could actually know.

The engineer John Lienhard wrote that no one was ever first to invent anything. The doughnut hole proves it politely: a documented inventor, a date, a patent filed decades later for a cutter to make it, and not one piece of it holding still.

Sources – Dan Evon, “The Sea Captain That (Probably) Invented Doughnuts,” Snopes, June 4, 2021. https://www.snopes.com/articles/346073/sea-captain-invented-doughnuts – Captain Hanson Gregory interview, The Washington Post, March 26, 1916 (via Newspapers.com clipping 78690269). – John H. Lienhard, “A Priority Allegory,” Engines of Our Ingenuity No. 1784, University of Houston. https://engines.egr.uh.edu/episode/1784 – “Doughnut holes,” The Lancaster Examiner (Lancaster, PA), July 3, 1861, the earliest mention of doughnut holes Snopes found in its archival search. – The Rock Island Argus (Rock Island, IL), November 1, 1941, on the National Dunkers Association vote.