Are Beignets Doughnuts? What the French Word Really Means

What the French mean by beignet

The Larousse dictionary defines a beignet as a fried preparation in which batter coats a savory or sweet ingredient, with apple and eggplant beignets as its examples. The word comes from beigne, an old word for a swelling, and 64 Parishes, Louisiana's humanities encyclopedia, suggests the name fits because the dough puffs up in hot oil.

In France today, 64 Parishes notes, beignet most often means a puffed fritter of pâte à choux, the same dough used for cream puffs. So a French beignet is usually closer to a fritter than to anything in a doughnut case. Food historian Cathy Kaufman traces the word as a cooking term back to a French text from 1314.

In New Orleans it was sold as a doughnut

The New Orleans version is a different dough: a very wet, yeast-raised dough rolled thin, cut into squares, fried and buried in powdered sugar. America's Test Kitchen explains that all that water turns to steam in the oil, which blows each square into a hollow pillow with a honeycombed inside. Our New Orleans beignets use that method.

For a long time nobody in town called them beignets. Kaufman points to an 1885 New Orleans cookbook whose yeast recipe is titled "Doughnuts," while the Picayune Creole Cook Book of 1900 filed its beignets under fritters. According to 64 Parishes, by the 1920s both French Market coffee stands, Café du Monde (opened by Fred Koeniger in 1862) and Morning Call (founded by Joseph Jurisich in 1870), sold the squares as doughnuts. The stands switched to the French name around mid-century, as tourism grew.

Who brought them? Nobody really knows

The usual explanation is that French-speaking colonists brought fried dough to Louisiana in the 18th century. New Orleans & Company, the city's tourism office, credits French-Creole colonists, while the state tourism site says it is believed Acadian settlers brought the tradition. 64 Parishes says the colonists could have come from France, French Canada or the Caribbean, and calls further claims about local origins conjecture.

The most romantic version says the Ursuline nuns carried the recipe from France in 1727. The nuns really did arrive in New Orleans that year, but no document ties them to beignets. Kaufman's verdict on nun origin stories: "the culinary fakelore antennae should be on high alert."

The state doughnut nobody can find

You will read almost everywhere that Louisiana made the beignet its official state doughnut in 1986. The state tourism site says the legislature had declared it by 1986, and a children's activity book from the Louisiana Legislature's communications office calls the beignet the State Donut.

The law itself is harder to find. CooksInfo says it could not locate the designation in the state's records, StateSymbolsUSA gives no act number, and our own search of the Legislature's website turned up only that activity book. Call it Louisiana's state doughnut by popular agreement. Either way, the beignet sits in our doughnuts of the world lineup next to the hole-less Portuguese malasadas and the Dutch oliebollen.

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