Whos responsible creating the doughnut hole?
Lots of theory but very little documentation. In sum? An excellent lesson in foodlore. “The first American doughnuts did not have holes at all; they were quite literally little “nuts” of dough. The Pilgrims, who had spent the years 1607-1620 in Holland, learned to make doughnuts there and brought them to New England; the most direct antecedent of the pastry seems to be of German origin, and these doughnuts came in all shapes and sizes. The first mention of the term in print was in Washington Irving’s History of New York…[1809]… The Pennsylvania Dutch were probably the first to make doughnuts with holes in their centers, a perfect shape for “dunking”…in coffee, which has become a standard method of eating doughtnuts for Americans. There seems little real evidence to support the story of a Rockport, Maine, sea captain named Hanson Crockett Gregory, who claimed to have poked out the soggy centers of his wife’s doughnuts in 1847 so that he might slip them over the spokes of his ship’
