Doughnut

A doughnut, also spelled donut, is a sweet snack made from leavened dough that is either fried or baked. It can be made at home or bought from bakeries, supermarkets, food stalls, and specialty chains. Most doughnuts are deep-fried, though baked or cake versions use a thick, leavened batter. The two main types are the ring doughnut and the filled doughnut, which is injected with fruit preserves, cream, custard, or other sweet fillings. Small pieces of dough are sometimes cooked as doughnut holes. After frying, they may be glazed with sugar icing, spread with chocolate or icing, or topped with sugar, cinnamon, sprinkles, or fruit. Other shapes include balls, flattened spheres, and twists. Varieties are also divided into cake doughnuts—including the old-fashioned type—and yeast-risen doughnuts. In the United States, doughnuts are often eaten with coffee or milk.

The earliest recorded recipe for a deep-fried dough ball comes from Cato the Elder’s *De agri cultura*, which used cheese, honey, and poppy seeds to make *globi*. Similar fried dough recipes spread across Europe and the world. A 13th-century Arabic cookbook by Ibn Razīn al-Tujībī includes a doughnut-like variant of *sfenj*, made by frying leavened semolina dough into small balls; the recipe also calls for shaping the dough into a *ka'ak* with a hole to test its proofing, a shape resembling the modern doughnut. The 1485 German cookbook *Küchenmeisterei* gives a recipe for *Gefüllte Krapfen*, stuffed fried dough cakes. The Spanish and Portuguese churro, a choux pastry dough often served in a ring shape, may have been brought to or introduced to China in the 16th century.

Dutch settlers brought *olykoek* ("oil cake") to New York in the early 18th century. These resembled later doughnuts but lacked the ring shape. A 1750 English recipe for fried dough "nuts" appeared in William Ellis's *The Country Housewife's Family Companion*. A recipe labeled "dow nuts" from Hertfordshire was found in a book of recipes from around 1800, written by the wife of Baron Thomas Dimsdale. The first cookbook using the near-conventional spelling "dough nuts" may be the 1803 edition of *The Frugal Housewife*. One of the earliest mentions of "dough-nut" is in Washington Irving's 1809 *A History of New York*, which describes "balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog's fat, and called dough-nuts, or oly koeks." The name *oly koeks* likely relates to the Dutch *oliekoek*. In the 1960s, frozen baked doughnuts began selling in U.S. supermarkets.

The word "nut" in "doughnut" originally meant "small rounded cake or cookie," as in "ginger nut." The earliest known literary use of "dough-nut" is in an 1808 short story. "Doughnut" remains the traditional spelling and dominates in the United States, though "donut" is also common. The first known printed use of "donut" appeared in George W. Peck's 1900 book *Peck's Bad Boy and his Pa*. Author John T. Edge claims the alternative spelling was invented in the 1920s by the Display Doughnut Machine Corporation to make the word easier for foreigners to pronounce. The "donut" spelling also appeared in a 1929 *Los Angeles Times* article. Dunkin' Donuts, founded in 1950 (originally Open Kettle in 1948), is the oldest surviving company to use the "donut" variation; it renamed to Dunkin' in 2019. According to Oxford Dictionaries, "doughnut" is used internationally, while "donut" is American.