Doughnut

A doughnut (or donut) is a food product made from leavened fried dough. It is prepared in many different forms and flavors with various toppings or glazes as a sweet snack that can be homemade or purchased commercially. In the USA, the word "doughnut" usually means fried dough with the shape of a torus, but in the UK the word "doughnut" often means a jelly doughnut.

Quotes

• I once asked my mom, "Why were you a socialist and not a communist?" And she said, "Better doughnuts."
  • Richard Dreyfuss, Growing Up with Communists & America's Final Stage | Richard Dreyfuss | POLITICS | Rubin Report. YouTube (April 23, 2023). (quote at 4:45 of 46:03 in video)

• I hold here a contract between myself and one Homer Simpson pledging me his soul for a doughnut — which I delivered ..."
  • cartoon character Ned Flanders, portraying the devil, (October 11, 2019)"The Simpsons - Homer's Donut Head". Skeletor, YouTube. (video clip from "Treehouse of Horror IV"; quote at 1:21 of 3:38)

• Shape with a doughnut cutter, fry in deep fat, take up on a skewer, and drain on brown paper. Add trimmings to one-half remaining mixture, roll, shape, and fry as before; repeat. Doughnuts should come quickly to top of fat, brown on one side, then be turned to brown on the other; avoid turning more than once. The fat must be kept at a uniform temperature. If too cold, doughnuts will absorb fat; if too hot, doughnuts will brown before sufficiently risen.
  • Fannie Merritt Farmer, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. Little, Brown. 1922. p. 82. 

• Doughnuts might have been designed for dunking. A doughnut, like bread is held together by an elastic net of the protein gluten. The gluten might stretch, and eventually even break, when the doughnut is dunked in hot coffee, but it doesn't swell or dissolve as the liquid is drawn into the network of holes and channels that the gluten supports. This means that the doughnut dunker can take his or her time, pausing only to let the excess liquid drain back into the cup before easing the doughnut to the waiting mouth.
  • Len Fisher, How to Dunk a Doughnut: The Science in Everyday Life. 2003. p. 2. ISBN 9781559706803. 

• The first known appearance of 'donut' in print was in a children's book, Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa, published in 1900. 'He would just drink a cup of coffee and eat a donut.' The cookbooks of the time used 'doughnut', and so it apparently remained until the 1920s, when Adolph Levitt, then owner of the New York-based Display Doughnut Machine Corporation, sought to promote his automated doughnut machines to foreign buyers, and 'donut' seemed a convenient shorthand. Perhaps his inspiration came from abbreviated spellings on street signs, for example 'D'nuts for sale', or from his many Jewish customers; the Yiddish word donat applies to an unfilled doughnut, as of course were those made by his machines. In America the interchangeability of the two spellings was established by the end of the 1930s, and the use of 'donut' has slowly increased in use there.
  • Heather Delancey Hunwick, "Chapter 1. The Doughnut Defined". Doughnut: A Global History. London: Reaktion Books Ltd. 

• Doughnuts loom as one more horrid substance we shovel into our collective mouths, symbols of Americans' ever-increasing laziness and obesity ... For many of us, doughnuts are a very special treat that has a very special status and we're not going to give it up. Or it's going to be one of the last treats that we're going to give up.
  • Paul Mullins, as quoted in 4th paragraph of text accompanying 'Glazed America:' For the Love of Doughnuts. NPR (August 31, 2008).

See also

• Dunkin' Donuts

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Doughnut on Wikipedia