The Bottom Line: Some fun facts about donuts to snack on!
The Full Story:
- The donut – or doughnut – as we know it today, supposedly came to Manhattan under the Dutch name of olykoeks, meaning oily cakes.
- “Doughnut” is the more traditional spelling, although its shortened form, “donut,” is also acceptable.
- They may have been created by mistake! One story reportedly tells of a cow who kicked over a pot of oil into a mixture of pasty.
- The first recorded use of the word “donut” is found in the 1900 story “Peck’s Bad Boy and His Pa” by George W. Peck. A character is quoted as saying, “Pa said he guessed he hadn’t got much appetite and he would just drink a cup of coffee and eat a donut.
- Over 10-billion doughnuts are made in the U.S. each year.
- A “cruller” is a fried pastry that traditionally looked like “small, braided torpedo.” It was considered a staple of the New England diet since the pilgrims. Aunt Em in “The Wizard of Oz” offers crullers to Hunk, Hickory, and Zeke after scolding them for being useless farmhands.
- The first doughnut machine was invented in New York during 1920 by a man named Adolph Levitt, a refugee from Czarist Russia. Levitt's doughnut machine was a huge hit causing doughnuts to spread like wildfire. He called it the “Wonderful Almost Human Automatic Donut Machine.”
- To 'dunk your doughnut' was allegedly introduced as a trend after actress Mae Murray accidently dropped one in her coffee.
- The largest doughnut ever made was an American-style jelly doughnut. It weighed 1.7 tons, was 16ft wide and 16inches high. It was made in Utica, New York, USA on January 21, 1993.
- The record for doughnut eating is held by John Haight, who ate 29 doughnuts in just over six minutes in 1981. Mmmmm!
- To go from a size 6 to a size 14 in just three-months to portray “Bridget Jones,” actress Renee Zellweger said she ate 20 doughnuts a day.
- Some unique doughnut flavors/names include Wasabi Cheese, Champagne, Poi (a common Hawaiian starch paste from the taro root), Southern Spice (made with Southern spices, green chilies, and thyme), Rosemary Olive Oil, Bubble Gum, Chicken & Waffle, and Psycho Psushi.