Each year on the first Friday in June, people participate in National Doughnut or Donut Day, celebrating the doughnut and honoring the Salvation Army Lassies. The Salvation Army Lassies are the women who served doughnuts to soldiers during WWI.
- In 1917, the original “Salvation Army Doughnut” was first served by the ladies of the Salvation Army.
- It was during WWI that the Salvation Army Lassies went to the front lines of Europe. Home-cooked foods, provided by these brave volunteers, were a morale boost to the troops.
- The doughnuts were often cooked in oil inside the metal helmets of American soldiers. American infantrymen were then commonly called “doughboys.” A more standard spelling of the word is “donut.”
- While no one really knows when doughnuts were invented or who invented them, doughnuts were originally made as a long twist of dough. Not in the ring form that is most common these days.
- It was also common in England for donuts to be made in a ball shape and injected with Jam after they were cooked.
- When cake donuts became popular in the 1830s, cooks found they cooked more evenly if you poked out the middle. Thus the hole in the doughnut.
- Doughnuts vs. Donuts? “Doughnut” is actually proper, but “donut” is acceptable. If you look in older dictionaries, you’ll only find “doughnut.” However, the Merriam-Webster dictionary now lists “donut” as a variant of “doughnut.”
- In the U.S. alone, more than 10 billion doughnuts are made every year.
- Per capita, Canada has more doughnut shops than any other country.
- Adolph Levitt invented the first doughnut machine in 1920.
- Doughnuts — loosely defined — are believed to have existed way back to prehistoric times, but doughnuts more or less as we know them today are said to have been brought to what would become Manhattan when it was still New Amsterdam. They were not terribly appealingly known as olykoeks — “oily cakes.”
- In 1996, the New York Times declared that “no profession is as closely identified with a food as police work is with doughnuts” and posited that, because so many police officers hang out in doughnut shops, they “have one of the lowest rates of robbery of any type of retail business.”
- Today, Entenmann’s doughnut bakery in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, is the largest doughnut bakery in the United States.
- Entenmann’s — which churns out 100,000 doughnuts every hour, 15 million every week, 780 million every year — has made more than 4 billion doughnuts. That’s enough to circle Earth nearly nine times if you laid them end to end.
- More than 55 million donuts would be needed to reach across the U.S. from Long Beach, California, to Long Island, New York.
- The first cookbook to mention donuts was an 1803 English cookbook with an appendix of American recipes.
- The name for a doughnut shape is a toroid. – Source
- Jelly-filled doughnuts and sufganiyot have been embraced by Jews as the ceremonial food of Hanukkah. Their rationale is that sufganiyot are cooked in hot oil and thus pay homage to the second-century B.C. rededication of the Holy Temple, during which the oil in the temple lamp lasted eight nights instead of the expected one. – Source
- Titanium dioxide is used to make powdered donuts whiter. – Source
- Ten people in the United States have the last name Doughnut or Donut. Ninety-five people have the name Longjohn (the name of a long doughnut). Twelve people have the name Bearclaw, 498 people have the name Sprinkles, 470 people in the U.S. have the name Fritter, and 1,634 have the name Sugar.
- 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.
- If a person added a doughnut a day to their regular diet, they would gain about one extra pound every 10 days
- In the 1934 movie, It Happened One Night, Clark Gable gave birth to the trend of dunking donuts in milk when he showed a fellow actor the “right way to do it.”
- During the 1940s, stars such as Johnny Carson, Pearl Buck, Red Skelton, Jimmy Durante, and Martha Graham were members of the National Dunking Association for Doughnuts. The association even provided membership cards.
- To climb up to the top of the Statue of Liberty, it would take 3,660 donuts. This sounds much better than looking at it in terms of stairs.
- The Grand Canyon’s narrowest point is roughly four miles wide. You would need 253,440 donuts on a string to reach the other side.
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