Happy Donut Day!!!
- Doughnuts – loosely defined – are believed to have existed way back to prehistoric times. Doughnuts as we know them today, were originally called olykoeks or “oily cakes” and made their debut in New Amsterdam later to become Manhattan.
- Many credit Elizabeth Gregory, the mother of a mid-19th-century New England ship captain, with creating the first doughnut with a hole in the middle. Some believe Gregory put hazelnuts or walnuts in the center of deep-fried dough to fill where the dough was unlikely to cook through. Another account states the hole was created when the ship captain spiked the doughnut on the ship wheel when he needed both hands to steer during a storm.
- Doughnuts became very popular during WWI when volunteers served them to United States soldiers while they were fighting on the front line. Apparently, they returned home with a taste for them.
- A Russian immigrant named Adolph Levitt invented the first doughnut machine in 1920, using it to make doughnuts at his bakery in New York City.
- Automatically produced doughnuts were highly popular at the 1934 World’s Fair, in Chicago. They were touted as “the food hit of the Century of Progress.”
- The Entenmann family invented the familiar “see-through” cake box for baked goods in 1959. They believed people were more inclined to buy what they could see.
- Entenmann’s has made more than 4 billion doughnuts, enough to circle the Earth nearly nine times.
- It would take roughly 3,660 doughnuts to reach the top of the Statue of Liberty.
- To reach all the way from Long Beach, California to Long Island, New York, you would need to span a trail of more than 55 million doughnuts.
