Who Invented Doughnuts?

From ancient fried dough to Dutch oil cakes to World War I trenches, the history of the doughnut is filled with twists, but naming a specific inventor leaves more than a few holes in the story. 

People around the world have been frying dough for centuries, says Michael Krondl, author of The Donut: History, Recipes and Lore from Boston to Berlin. But today’s doughnut emerged from a mix of food traditions that converged in America, where it evolved from an occasional indulgence into an everyday treat. 

“Doughnuts were immigrants,” Krondl says. “They sort of hybridized here and transformed into something that was purely American.”

The roots of the doughnut stretch back thousands of years. According to Paul R. Mullins’ Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut, fried dough appeared in many cultures, including Chinese, Turkish, Roman and Greek cuisines. Related pastries developed around the world, he writes, from French beignets and Mexican sopapillas to German jelly-filled bismarcks and Hawaiian malasadas. Even the Bible references “cakes mingled with oil.”

“Whenever and wherever there has been a supply of oil or fat, dough frying has followed,” The Washington Post reports. “Petrified rings of dough have been unearthed in this country, and attributed to tribes predating the Pueblo. … Cookery books all over the world pay homage to fritters, fritures, frytures. Sufganiya, beignet, olykoek, spudnut, smultboller, dabla, cruller, fastnacht cake, aebleskiver.” 

Those fried foods may be distant relatives of today’s doughnut, but historians say no single culture can claim ownership of the modern version. 

“Fried dough certainly was born somewhere in the reaches of prehistory,” Mullins writes, though he adds it is “impossible to identify a single cultural group or region as its ‘inventor.’”

The ancestor most closely connected to the American doughnut is generally considered the Dutch olykoek, or “oil cake,” Krondl says, which was brought to North America by Dutch settlers in the 17th century. 

The New York Times points to Anna Joralemon selling olykoeks in her New Amsterdam shop in 1673. “More than 200 years later, free doughnuts were handed to the huddled masses arriving at Ellis Island, as they were later to the hungry during the Great Depression.”

One of the earliest written references to the doughnut appears in Washington Irving’s 1809 satire, A History of New York. Describing Dutch colonial feasts, he wrote of “balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, and called dough nuts, or oly koeks.”

The invention of the doughnut hole is often credited to Hanson Gregory, a Maine sea captain who claimed in a 1916 newspaper interview that he invented the ring-shaped doughnut at the age of 16 while aboard a schooner in 1847. According to stories repeated throughout the 20th century, Gregory was frustrated by greasy, undercooked doughnuts and decided to cut out the center so the pastry could cook more evenly. 

In Glazed America, Mullins recounts a version of the story in which Gregory complained that doughnuts were “soggy, greasy and almost indigestible” and asked himself, “Why so much dough in one lump?”

It’s a good story, but historians aren’t sure it’s true. 

Krondl suspects the hole emerged for practical culinary reasons. As 19th-century bakers increasingly used chemical leaveners instead of yeast, he says, they could make sweeter doughs. The problem was that sugary dough tended to burn before cooking through. Recipes for doughnut-like pastries with holes also predate Gregory’s account, he adds. 

“Somebody had the clever idea, ‘Hey, if we cut out the middle, it’ll cook all the way through,’” Krondl says. “I have no way of proving this, but I think that makes sense.”

By the early 20th century, doughnuts were already common in many American home kitchens. Their rise to national popularity, however, required industrialization. 

One key figure was Adolph Levitt, a Russian immigrant baker in New York. According to Krondl, Levitt developed an automated doughnut-making machine in 1920. Levitt later founded the Doughnut Corporation of America, supplying both machines and prepackaged mixes to bakeries nationwide to mass-produce the food. 

Krispy Kreme, founded in 1937, and Dunkin’ Donuts, founded in 1950, later helped expand the doughnut’s reach across the country. Inspired in part by Howard Johnson’s famous assortment of ice cream flavors, Dunkin’ founder William Rosenberg promoted a variety of doughnut flavors and fillings, helping transform the item into a mass-market staple.

Doughnuts also played a role in American military history. 

During World War I in 1917, Salvation Army volunteer Helen Purviance and other young women stationed near the front searched for a way to boost soldiers’ morale. They first thought of serving apple pie, Krondl says, but the ingredients and equipment made that impractical under battlefield conditions. 

Doughnuts, though, were relatively simple.

“You need flour, you need baking powder, you need a little bit of sugar, and you need some fat to fry it in,” Krondl says. “And the reality is that even a bad doughnut, when it’s fresh, is really good, particularly if it’s the middle of winter in the Ardennes and you’re up to your waist in mud.”

The effort was a huge success. According to Mullins, Purviance later said she and the “Doughnut Lassies” distributed more than 1 million doughnuts to troops.

“I was literally on my knees when those first doughnuts were fried, seven at a time, in a small frying pan,” Purviance later recalled, according to Mullins. “There was also a prayer in my heart that somehow this home touch would do more for those who ate the doughnuts than satisfy a physical hunger.”

Krondl says young soldiers associated doughnuts with mothers and home cooking. “They could see their mothers through the hole of the doughnut,” he says.

The tradition continued during World War II but on a larger scale, Krondl adds. Levitt's company supplied portable doughnut machines so that Red Cross workers could serve fresh doughnuts to troops overseas.

Before the 20th century, doughnuts weren’t necessarily considered a breakfast food. “They were eaten pretty much all day long in 19th-century New England,” Krondl says.

That changed as cities expanded, coffee shops began serving doughnuts and doughnut shops opened early in the morning to cater to workers. Doughnuts were inexpensive, portable and paired naturally with coffee.

“As the country became urbanized, doughnuts became a quick thing to eat in the morning,” Krondl says.

Today, Americans eat roughly 10 billion doughnuts a year. They’re everywhere, from gas stations and office break rooms to boutique bakeries and high-end restaurants selling gourmet creations topped with everything from bubble gum to bacon.

But for Krondl, the appeal remains simple. 

“Sweet fried dough,” he says. “What could be better than that?”