Painting of a seventeenth-century, Dutch woman holding a pot filled with oliebollen, a precursor to the present-day doughnut
25 August 2020
We all know that doughnuts, often spelled donuts, are sweet, toroidal cakes, stereotypically favored by office workers and police officers. As to the word’s origin, it’s obviously a compound of dough + nut. The dough part is obvious enough, but where does the nut come from?
The answer is that the doughnut was not always shaped like a torus. The first doughnuts were small, round balls of fried dough, resembling a large nut, what are today sometimes called a doughnut hole and marketed by Dunkin’ Donuts as a Munchkin or Tim Horton’s as a Timbit. The reason for the toroidal shape is to allow for a larger cake, which would not cook all the way through without the hole. The toroidal shape probably became common in the mid nineteenth century.
The first known reference to a doughnut is from a 1782 New England diary entry of a Thomas Hazard. In the entry for 11 February, he makes note of have having eaten donotes. His other entries don’t typically refer to food, so it seems that doughnuts were unusual enough for him to make a special note. This would square with the common understanding that doughnuts originated with Dutch settlers in New York and finding them in New England in 1782 would have been unusual. His diary entry for 11 February 1782 reads:
C.W. w. made pr Bridle Bitts Fn Am helpt George make Plank Nails. went Down to haners hill to help up Cousin Hazards Coalt. George went to Tower hill. James Congdon was hurt by ahorse. Fried Donotes.
Other than that they existed, this brief mention doesn’t tell us anything about the doughnuts that Hazard ate. But several decades later, Washington Irving, in his 1809 History of New York does describe them and gives important clues as to their culinary origin:
Sometimes the table was graced with immense apple pies, or saucers filled with 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 this city, excepting in genuine dutch families; but which retrains its pre-eminent station at the tea tables in Albany.
Oliekoek, to use present-day spelling, is Dutch for oil cake. The round balls of fried dough are still served today in the Netherlands and Flanders, although today they are generally called oliebollen, or oil balls. They were brought to the New World by Dutch settlers in New York and the Hudson River Valley.
By the late nineteenth century, the toroidal cakes were so common that doughnut was being used to refer to anything that was toroidal. An early example of this sense comes from an 1884 article in an obstetrics journal describing the treatment for an inverted uterus, a rare, but serious, complication of childbirth. Like many descriptions of nineteenth-century medical treatments, this one is rather unnerving to present-day sensibilities. The first step in the treatment reads:
The method of treatment was as follows: A soft rubber doughnut pessary large enough to closely fit but not distend the vagina was tied to the end of a broom-stick which had been made smooth by sandpaper.
A doughnut can also be a circle formed by a controlled skid of an automobile. This sense is first recorded in the slang of California car culture in 1951. It appears in a glossary in the journal Western Folklore:
To peel a doughnut. To make a complete, fast turn.
So that’s where the nut came from and how teen hotrodders came to use the word.
Sources:
Johnson, Frederick W. “Two Cases of Inversion of the Uterus Treated After Wing’s Method. The American Journal of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children, vol. 17, 1 August 1884, 815. ProQuest.
Hazard, Thomas B. Nailer Tom’s Diary. Caroline Hazard, ed. Boston: Merrymount Press, 1930, 29. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Irving, Washington (as Diedrich Knickerbocker). A History of New York, vol. 1 of 2. New York: Inskeep and Bradford, 1809, 149. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2018, s.v. doughnut, n.
Van Dorn, Douglas. “Jalopy Slang.” Western Folklore, vol. 10, no. 3, July 1951, 248. JSTOR Complete.
Image Credit: Aelbert Cuyp (1620–91), painted c. 1652, Dordrechts Museum, public domain image.