Doughnuts (or donuts)

The optimist sees the donut, the pessimist sees the hole.

Oscar Wilde

The photograph at left was sent to us by our touring USA son and family. I think they were in Portland Oregon, and had done donuts and the art gallery that day. Anyway they were so extreme and so over the top American that I thought it was worth doing a tiny post on doughnuts. And just to emphasise the extremity of American doughnuts here are some more from the grandchildren. I do not know if they are from the Krispy Kreme chain or just a doughnut shop, but to my mind anyway, they are completely over the top.

There is certainly no doubt that they are hugely popular in America - they make 10 billion of them per year. However, the Canadians apparently take the crown as the nation who eat the most doughnuts per capita, which I find mildly surprising. Maybe it's because it's so cold. According to the scientists we like them so much because it's a double whammy of fat and sugar.

"we may have separate systems in the brain to evaluate fatty or carb-heavy foods. If both get activated at the same time, this tricks the brain to produce a larger amount of dopamine – and a bigger feeling of reward – than there should be based on the food’s energy content. This could be because when the human brain evolved, our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate a diet consisting mainly of plants and meat, and never encountered food that is high in both carbs and fat. The brain is used to seeing one signal at a time. Modern food is tricking the system, Dana Small - Yale University

They are certainly not good for you anyway.

A little history. They were said to have been taken to America by the Dutch in the seventeenth century and became known as olykoeks which means oily cakes. These did not have holes in them, and actually the Dutch call them oliebollen (oily balls).

You can find a recipe for them on the SBS. They are still traditionally eaten on Shrove Tuesday in the Netherlands. As you can see they have no hole in the middle. The story about the hole is that an American sailor called Hanson Gregory made the hole in the doughnuts they ate on his ship with some kind of tin, because the middle of the doughnut was often undercooked. He also added the spices. Later though his mother extended this:

"Elizabeth Gregory, a New England ship captain's mother who made a wicked deep-fried dough that cleverly used her son's spice cargo of nutmeg and cinnamon, along with lemon rind. Some say she made it so son Hanson and his crew could store a pastry on long voyages, one that might help ward off scurvy and colds. In any case, Mrs. Gregory put hazelnuts or walnuts in the center, where the dough might not cook through, and in a literal-minded way called them doughnuts." Smithsonian Magazine

So as you can see there are a few variations on this particular tale, which took place in the 1840s.

Later still in WW1 the Salvation Army girls at the front made and served doughnuts to the soldiers to raise morale, and very popular they were. As in the Depression - for they were very cheap to make.

Then came industrialisation and Krispy Kreme and excess and the rest is history.

In Britain they don't seem to go for the holes quite as much. The ones I remember from my youth - I think they were bought not made at home - were round balls and had jam in the middle. I suspect that my mother did not make them because they contained yeast. I don't remember her ever making bread - until I did at school and tried to get her to make some too. So I don't think she made the doughnuts either. We did have them occasionally though.

"the kind of doughnut you can find in any British high street bakers, dusted with crunchy caster sugar (icing sugar is the mark of an inferior specimen) and grudgingly filled with a parsimonious dab of strawberry or raspberry jam." Felicity Cloake

And Felicity Cloake will tell you how to make the perfect jam doughnut. She also had this lovely schoolmarm quote from Elizabeth David.

"frankly, doughnuts are not for me. I have never made them, and haven't eaten them since schooldays". Elizabeth David

And still in the England, the irrepressible Heston Blumenthal has a recipe for Exploding potato doughnuts. It looks pretty complicated to make.

When we came to Australia I remember occasionally buying a bag of cinnamon doughnuts for myself and the children when we went shopping in Greensborough. I vaguely remember there being a little stand there that made them. These were basic doughnuts with a hole and dusted with sugar and cinnamon. They were delicious and surprisingly light. In fact I was so inspired by them that I did try to make some once, but they weren't a great success.

But of course the whole world makes a variety of doughnut - a sweet pastry fried in oil and dusted with sugar or an equivalent - and here in Melbourne at the Queen Vic Market you can buy the Spanish version from a truck that has been serving them since forever. They are advertised as Spanish doughnuts, but of course they are churros and they are long and twisty rather than round. Which I suppose leads to the question of when a doughnut is really a doughnut or is it a donut anyway?

I think the Spanish dunk them in chocolate and I gather the Americans dunk them too - in coffee I think. I have never done this and I can't imagine that it would be good. Chocolate maybe, or a syrup - but coffee no.

So there you go - doughnuts. When in America eat like the Americans - well not too much. They don't really have the right attitude to food do they? Well the ones who aren't health freaks anyway.

"If you stop eating donuts you will live 3 years longer. It's just 3 more years that you want a donut." Lewis Black

“A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?” Margaret Atwood, Der blinde Mörder