Many a sleepless night have I endured pondering what were doughnuts like before the hole.
Well today I'm gonna find out with these doughnuts from 1803.
So thank you to Morning Brew for sponsoring this video as we make something you "donut" want to miss,
this time on Tasting History.
People disagree about a lot of things today but one thing I feel that cannot be denied by anyone
is that doughnuts are awesome.
I'd sell my soul for a donut.
Exactly but instead of selling your soul all you have to do
is follow this recipe. The earliest recipe that I could find for something actually called a doughnut.
The recipe likely comes from the mid-1700s but it wasn't written down until 1803 in
'The Frugal Housewife or Complete Woman Cook' by Susannah Carter.
"Dough nuts. To one pound of flour, put one quarter of a pound of butter,
one quarter of a pound of sugar, and two spoonfuls of yeast;
mix them all together in warm milk or water, of the thickness of bread, let it raise,
and make them in what form you please, boil your fat (consisting of hogs lard), and put them in."
Butter, sugar and lard, sounds delightful. Especially with a nice cup of coffee though
without a hole these might be kind of hard to dunk even for Clark Gable.
Dunking's an art. Don't let it soak so long.
A dip and plop into your mouth.
But dunked or not the perfect way to start your morning is with a donut and your morning brew though
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You can even read it while you're enjoying your doughnuts, and for this recipe what you'll need is:
"3 and 3/4 cups or 450 grams of flour, 1 stick or 113 grams of salted butter,
a half cup plus a tablespoon or 113 grams of sugar, four and a half teaspoons or 15 grams of dried yeast,
a half cup or 120 milliliters of water, 3/4 of a cup or 175 milliliters of milk,
and 1 quart or 1 liter of melted lard, or other oil.
So first mix the tablespoon of sugar into the water, and then sprinkle the yeast over it.
Let it sit for about 10 minutes to bloom while you work the
Then add the sugar and work it in, and then the yeast.
Then you're going to add the milk, but don't add it all at once because you might not need it all
depending on what flour you end up using. You want this to be a sticky dough but you don't want it to be unworkable.
Though if you do find it too sticky you can always just add a little bit more flour.
Either way bring it all together into a dough, and then knead it until it's nice and smooth,
and because this is a very sticky dough I suggest using a stand mixer if you've got one.
Once it's kneaded put it into a bowl and cover it, letting it proof for about one to two hours
or until it doubles in size.
Then take it out, give it a couple more kneads and divide it up.
This should make about two dozen doughnuts. You can make them smaller but I wouldn't make them any bigger
because they will be hard to fry all the way through.
Then you're going to shape the doughnuts, but the real question is what shape are these doughnuts because
this recipe is before the invention of the doughnut hole,
and the recipe says to make them into whatever shape you like, so clearly
there were multiple ways of doing it at the time.
Now while the word dough nut implies that they were probably originally round like a nut,
one recipe from 1828 calls for them to be
cut "in diamonds with a jagging iron or sharp knife.
Diamonds, squares, and stars seem to be popular shapes for doughnuts in the 19th century, but
I am going to go with what 'The Virginia Housewife' recommends
and that is to shape them as "cakes the size of a half dollar."
So roll them into small balls and gently flatten them into cakes,
and then place them on some parchment.
Then cover them and let them proof for another 15 to 20 minutes while you heat your lard
to 350 degrees Fahrenheit or 175 Celsius.
Then without crowding the pot or deep fryer, add four or five doughnuts at a time.
Now the fry time is going to depend on a number of factors, but I'd start with one minute
and then turn them over and fry for another minute. Then take them out and let them drain.
Now I'm using paper towels to catch all the oil, but a 19th century German recipe
says "When they are cooked place on a slice of bread to soak the fat."
So if you don't have paper towels, bread might work too.
Now as we fry up the rest of the doughnuts I ask you to hit the Like button, make sure you subscribe to Tasting History,
and allow me to take you through the wonderful world of doughnuts.
Now to tackle the history of doughnuts we must first ask the question,
what is a doughnut because if it's just any fried dough
we're going to be here all day because every country has their own version of fried dough.
Funnel cake, jalebi, beignet, zeppole, churro,
and is a churro a doughnut? I donut think so.
So we will confine our history to the round hole in the middle doughnut,
but even to get to that we still gotta go way back because
the doughnut's ancestors include things like the ancient Roman globi which we've made here on the channel,
and in the 3rd century BC a Chinese poem talks of
"Fried honey-cakes of rice flour, and sugar-malt sweetmeats; jadelike wine, honey-flavored fills the winged cups."
And when Marco Polo was in China around 1275 he mentioned these exact
proto doughnuts that had clearly been around for 1500 years.
At the same time in the Middle East Shahrazad's '1,001 Arabian Nights'
mentioned "Kun fa swimming in bees honey, fritters, and almond cakes."
And based on recipes of the time those fritters might have been what were called luqam al-qadi
which were balls of fermented dough fried in sesame oil then dipped in syrup, and sprinkled with sugar.
Starting to sound a lot like a doughnut to me and over the next few centuries those fritters
spread all over the Middle East, Northern Africa and up into Europe.
Similar fritters made with apples became all the rage during Lent
and in the 14th century Spanish cookbook 'Libre de Sent Sovi' there's a recipe
for bunols which at the time were egg and cheese doughnuts that were fried and covered in sugar.
At the same time the Germans were making a whole host of schmalzgebackens including one with the
unfortunate name krapfen which is actually the ancestor of today's jelly doughnut.
Now one of the most important recipes in the history of doughnuts comes from Bartolomeo Scappi and is
for an enriched leavened dough with cinnamon and raisins that was fried, then covered in sugar,
and it's important because it led to a Dutch recipe for oliekoeken or oily cakes.
Today they're often called oliebollen or oily balls.
These first appeared in the 1667 cookbook 'De Verstandige Kock'
and these Dutch oliekoeken ended up becoming American doughuts because as they might be giants told us
even old New York was once New Amsterdam, and it was in New York that doughnuts became a thing.
Washington Irving wrote about this culinary handoff in his satirical
'History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch dynasty' in 1809.
"Sometimes the table was graced with immense apple pies or saucers full of preserved peaches and pears;
but it was always sure to boast 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 the city, accepting in genuine Dutch families."
Though Irving's history was a satire he even wrote it under the pseudonym 'Diedrich Knickerbocker'.
So anything it says does need to be taken with a bit of a grain of salt but
his link between the two pastries does seem plausible, though his claim that they were scarcely known
except in Dutch families seems probably not true because oly koeks and by that time doughnuts
were popular throughout New York.
Also giving full credit to the Dutch for making the American doughnut seems a bit too generous,
as other fried doughs like the French beignet or even the German krapfen
likely also contributed to our modern day doughnut, and the name doughnut is most definitely of English origin.
Though this connection between doughnuts and the Dutch does seem to persist.
"I think it was in 1796 that Mrs. Jeroleman set a table in the market to sell hot coffee for three pence a cup,
and doughnuts for one penny each. She was a large woman, and reported to weigh 225 pounds.
A genuine frou from the heights of Bergen. As she moved in the market with her broad Dutch face,
the butcher boys sung out there goes the large doughnut."
Kids can be so cruel.
But by 1819 the doughnut had broken away from its European brethren
and found its own place in the fried dough family.
In 'The legend of Sleepy Hollow' Washington Irving describes
"cakes of various and almost indescribable kinds known only to experienced Dutch housewives!
There was the doughty dough-nut, the tenderer olikok and the crisp and crumbling cruller."
So the doughnut had now become distinct but its evolution was far from over. First
when did it make the leap from the dessert table to the breakfast table?
We're not exactly sure but Henry David Thoreau wrote that
in Cape Cod at breakfast "We had eels, buttermilk, cake, cold bread, green beans, doughnuts and tea."
I for one am very glad that eels have fallen off the breakfast menu.
Now the other even more iconic step was when did the doughnut get its hole?
See many doughnuts at the time had a reputation for either being burnt to a crisp on the outside
or underdone on the inside and both the dutch and the english had a way to
to get around this problem and that was to make it so that the middle was not dough at all.
"Now I fancy you wondering what a doughnut can be... Well then, picture to yourself
a round ball of dough quite brown outside; now open it-
oh! There is a little cluster of plums in the middle."
Plums being another word for raisins or other dried fruit but
American recipes from the time never had this for their doughnuts and so
American doughnuts were either burnt to a crisp or raw inside.
That is until Captain Hanson Gregory came along.
Now this is almost undoubtedly a myth but
it is a good myth and the most persistent myth.
The story goes that in 1847 Captain Gregory of Maine
went out a-sailing along with some nutmeg and cinnamon doughnuts that his mother Elizabeth had made for him.
The problem was her doughnuts were always raw in the center and so he took the top of a tin pepper box
and cut out that uncooked dough in the middle,
making "the first donut hole ever seen by mortal eyes."
Though another version of his story has him jamming the doughnut onto one of the spokes of the ship's wheel
during a storm because he needed both hands but still wanted to eat the doughnut,.
Doesn't seem likely.
Also I recently found this painting of a little girl from 50 years
before this whole story and it appears that she is holding a doughnut with a hole
so it really makes me question everything.
But that ended up becoming the standard form of most doughnuts
and doing that allows the oil to get up into the center of the doughnut cooking it evenly all the way through.
Now I know what you're thinking, you haven't even been listening to me ever since you realized
doughnuts don't seem a very practical food for a long sea voyage,
but they were surprisingly popular on whaling ships.
To celebrate the filling of the thousandth barrel of whale oil
it was customary to fry up a batch of donuts in that oil. In a diary entry from 1846 it said
"At 7 pm boats got fast to a whale, at 9 got him to the ship.
Men all singing and bawling Doughnuts,
Doughnuts tomorrow. as this will certainly make us one thousand barrels."
Now fortunately whale oil did not remain the most popular oil for frying donuts
because shortening was a lot cheaper and a lot easier to get your hands on.
There was Crisco and then another company called Cream Crisp which boasted
"It will cut your lard and butter bill squarely in two."
Now Cream Crisp was only around for a short while before Procter and Gamble who owned Crisco
slapped them with a patent lawsuit and
Cream Crisp ended up going away and they were definitely gone by 1937 when Krispy Kreme opened its doors.
And the company says that this is not the case but I kind of wonder if there isn't some link because
how much of a coincidence is it to spell crisp and cream having to do with donuts with k's.
It just seems too much. Regardless before Krispy Kreme was serving up doughnuts it was a job for the Salvation Army.
During WWI ensign Margaret Sheldon and adjutant Helen Perviance
in an effort to cheer up homesick troops on the front lines began frying doughnuts.
Originally supposedly in the metal helmets of soldiers and only later upgrading to empty trash cans.
They would hand them out to the boys and became known as doughnut lassies or doughnut dollies
and it's fitting that they were handing these out to doughboys which was often what the American soldiers were called
though the term has actually nothing to do with doughnuts.
Now while WWI eventually came to an end, the soldiers love for donuts did not.
They returned home and they demanded doughnuts and the home cooks of America just could not keep up with demand,
but in 1920 a Russian immigrant named Adolf Levitt invented, and this is the real name,
the wonderful almost human automatic doughnut machine,
and it pumped out a thousand doughnuts an hour in his New York bakery.
Now he was not the first person to spell doughnut d-o-n-u-t
but he was the first person to make it
very popular it seems possibly because it took up less ink or possibly because the Yiddish word was
donat, d-o-n-a-t, or it just made it easier to sound out to his largely immigrant customer base.
Now he eventually started selling the machine under a shorter name the Display Doughnut Machine,
and by 1931 he was making 25 million dollars a year selling these donut machines all around the world.
The New Yorker described one of these donut machines in Times Square.
"We can tell you a little about the donut making place in broadway donuts float dreamly through a grease canal in a glass
enclosed machine walk dreamily up a moving ramp and tumble dreamily into an outgoing basket.
Other than the fact that the writer couldn't come up with a synonym for dreamily, it does sound quite nice.
The doughnut craze continued especially after being named hit food of the
century of progress at the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago.
And they really were the hit food of the century because it wasn't long before doughnut shops began springing up all over the country.
It was Spudnuts and Krispy Kreme both of whom used potato in their doughnuts,
and then there was Randy's, Winchells and Dunkin Donuts, and while they became popular elsewhere like Tim Hortons in Canada.
Donuts remain a quintessentially American food.
After all who is more quintessentially American
than that greatest of donut lovers Homer J Simpson, and I have to wonder,
what would homer think of our two centuries-old donuts.
And here we are doughnuts from 1803.
Now a lot of recipes from the time say to dust them in nutmeg or cinnamon or sugar I went with a little bit of powdered sugar but
you can put a lot of different things on them to kind of flavor them but let's give them a shot.
[Nom Nom]
That's really good.
So they're not as sweet as a modern donut like if you got a cake donut or something like that not quite as sweet but still
has a little sweetness to it. They kind of remind me flavor-wise of a sweet croissant.
Texture-wise it reminds me a lot of of a modern donut maybe a little denser but not not that much.
The center it actually looks pretty well done to me maybe a little bit underdone,
but that's why I made some that were round with a hole in it to see if there is a big difference.
Yep completely cooked all the way through.
[Chomp]
I'm not gonna lie doughnuts are kind of a pain in the butt to make, but
they are really, really good and you know if you have the time and inclination I definitely suggest you do it.
Now I did want to share with you one of Adolf Levitt, the guy who made the doughnut machine, one of his mottos.
It was called the optimist's creed "As you ramble on through life, brother, whatever be your goal,
keep your eye upon the doughnut, and not upon the hole."
Definitely words to live by so make sure to follow me on Instagram @ tastinghistorywithmaxmiller
and I will see you next time on Tasting History
several pounds more because you know
I'm gonna be finishing all these doughnuts.
[Chomp]
Hmm! :)