In The U.S. Alone, More Than 10 Billion Doughnuts Are Made Every Year.

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• While no one really knows when doughnuts were invented or who invented them, doughnuts were originally made as a long twist of dough.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.
• American Hansen Gregory claimed to have invented the ring-shaped doughnut in 1847 aboard a lime-trading ship when he was 16 years old.
• 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.
• There are approximately over 10 billion doughnuts made in the United States each year.
•  The name for a doughnut shape is a toroid. – Source
•  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.
• Jelly-filled doughnuts, 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

Sources:

National Day Calendar

Days of the Year

Mobile-Cuisine

Food Network

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