Why Do Doughnuts Have Holes? The Sea Captain Story, Checked

The sea captain's story

On March 26, 1916, The Washington Post ran an interview with Hanson Gregory, an old Maine sailor then living at Sailors' Snug Harbor in Quincy, Massachusetts. He said that as a teenager at sea in 1847, doughnuts were cut into diamonds and twisted strips that fried fine at the edges but stayed raw dough inside.

His fix, he said, was to take the lid off the ship's tin pepper box and punch out the middle, cutting "the first hole ever seen by mortal eyes." The story stuck. In November 1947 his friends dedicated a bronze tablet at his birthplace in Rockport, Maine, crediting him with inventing the hole in 1847, and both The New York Times and The Washington Post covered the ceremony.

Why historians doubt it

The only witness is Gregory himself. The word researcher Barry Popik searched historical newspaper databases and found nothing tying Gregory to the doughnut before that 1916 interview, about 70 years after the day in question. His own telling also shifted over the years, and popular retellings have added more color since.

Food historians also note that he was not the first person to fry dough with a hole in it. Michael Krondl, author of The Donut, has pointed out that holed fried pastries are far older, going back a very long way in North Africa, and that recipes for holed, doughnut-like pastries predate Gregory's account. He also admits he cannot prove exactly where the American ring came from. Neither can anyone else, which is why the hole's origin is still called disputed.

The practical reason: an even fry

The likeliest explanation is the same problem Gregory complained about. Krondl's account goes like this: in the 19th century American cooks moved from slow yeast doughs to quick chemical leaveners, and they made the dough sweeter. Sugar browns fast, so a thick sweet doughnut can burn outside before the center cooks. Knock out the middle and every part sits close to the oil.

The culinary historian Linda Civitello makes the same point in her book Cuisine and Culture: the hole lets doughnuts cook faster. By 1870, Eater's Daniela Galarza reports, cutters with two concentric circles were selling in home catalogs. Our classic glazed doughnuts still work that way, with a 3-inch cutter for the ring and a 1-inch cutter for the center, and the rings fry in 1 to 1 1/2 minutes a side. The cut-out centers fry together as doughnut holes.

Other theories, and doughnuts that never had a hole

Krondl has also suggested, in Eater's account, that the ring may come from recipes telling cooks to shape the dough like a jumble, a once common ring-shaped cookie. That is a guess about influence, not a documented origin.

The doughnut's Dutch ancestor had no hole at all. In 1809 Washington Irving described Dutch tables in old New York loaded with balls of sweetened dough fried in hog's fat and called doughnuts or olykoeks. Lydia Maria Child's 1832 American Frugal Housewife gives a dough-nut recipe raised with pearlash and says nothing about shape. The Dutch still fry balls: our oliebollen are scooped and dropped, no cutter needed. You can see both shapes, ring and ball, side by side in our doughnuts hub, and the two American rings face off in glazed vs old-fashioned.

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