Everyone loves doughnuts – it’s a delicious treat that makes us smile.
Today is Doughnut Day, the day the world celebrates and honours this sweet’s history and rise to international popularity.
Some of the doughnut’s history isn’t clear, but what we do know is that their unusual appearance started appearing in the United States in the mid-19th century.
It is said Hanson Gregory invented them because he was sick of the undercooked centres and greasiness of doughnuts he could only buy at the time. Allegedly, the first circular doughnuts simply had the hole punched out with a pepper shaker.
But records show that the Dutch made “olykoeks” or oil cakes as early as the mid-19th century.
- Over 10 billion doughnuts are made in the US each year.
- The French used to call their doughnuts nuns’ farts.
- Doughnuts were declared the hit food of the century in 1933.
- Doughnuts were served to soldiers during WWI.
- The first doughnut machine was invented in the 1920s, in New York, by a man named Adolph Levitt, a refugee from Czarist Russia.
- The largest doughnut ever made was an American-style jelly doughnut. It weighed 1,7 tons, was 4,87m wide and 40,46cm high. It was made in Utica, New York on 21 January 1993.
- The record for doughnut eating is held by John Haight. He ate 29 doughnuts in just over six minutes in 1981.
