A Brief History of Doughnuts

Making basic pastes or doughs and frying them has been part of human civilization for centuries. From this, the doughnut eventually evolved, and also caused a number of heated debates along the way. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and Tracy. Before we get to the show today,
we have to talk. We have a little business to
talk about an upcoming live show, very exciting. We UH

(00:24):
were lucky enough to be invited to participate in Great
Conversations at Gettysburg, which is a series of programs that
they have there that draw on the themes of Gettysburg.
And that's going to take place on June at the
rough House History Center and it's free. You can just
go see us chat. There is cool programming going on
all day long. That day, we are going to have

(00:46):
our live podcast, which is called Fearless, Feisty and Unflagging
the Women of Gettysburg at four pm. But if you're
up for a day of interesting history, there is a
lot of other stuff to check out that day, so
come and see us. And if you want more detail
about that, you can come to our website and up
at the top of the page at misson History dot
com is the link that says live shows. Or you

(01:07):
can just go to missed in history dot com slash
shows and it's there too. Yeah, super handy. Uh So,
now to the topic at hand, and I feel like
I need to say that there was accidental good timing.
I am not as good at planning head and looking
at calendars and basing programming on it as Tracy is.
I fly a little bit more by the seat of
my pants, but entirely by accident. I started researching this

(01:29):
topic because I knew, because of poor time management and
me getting a little caught up with some other non
history class work over the past week, that I was
going to have to do some work over the weekend.
And I thought was, how to do some work on
the weekend, I'm gonna pick a topic I'm really into.
So we're talking about donuts today. So but then I
realized about halfway through it that when we publish, it

(01:52):
is actually going to fall on National Donut Day, which
is June five. Complete accidental good fortune unless I just
have been heternalized the concept of National Donut Day to
such a degree that my subconscious was like, you should
do the episode now, right, So we're actually gonna talk
a little bit about how National Donut Day started A

(02:12):
little later on that was actually UM started in a
more official capacity than maybe some of the other food
based national days you may hear about UM. But first
we're going to talk about the early predecessors of donuts
in history and kind of how donuts evolved over time.
And then the last segment of the show, which is
the longest for this one, is a nutty little battle

(02:34):
about donut nomenclature that played out over the course of
several decades in the pages of the New York Times,
primarily in their Letters to the Editors section. So if
you fancy a donut now, it's a good time to
get one, because you're in for a lot of fried
dough talk and you might be craving one by the end. Otherwise. Yeah,
I I will say it does not surprise me at
all that there was a debate about donut nomenclature that

(02:57):
went on for decades, because I feel like the Internet
has been talking about whether a hot dog is a
sandwich for decades exactly the same idea. So we've talked
about food histories on the podcast enough that it is
not new knowledge for our regular listeners when we say
that as far back as the Neolithic period, people were
making does and cooking them on hot stones. We have

(03:19):
discoveries along those lines that show up in our unearthed
episodes pretty regularly. And that concept of a simple paste
made of a ground grain flower mixed with a liquid
and then fried up developed in some form or another
in cultures all around the globe in human kinds early years.
Instructions for cooking cake in boiling fat can be found

(03:41):
in Egyptian tombs going back to the fifteenth century b c. E.
Fried dough coated with honey was given to winners in
the early Olympic Games as prizes. Marcus Porcius Cato the
Elder included recipes for a number of dough based confections
in his writing on Agriculture, which he wrote in the
second century BC, and that writing includes one recipe that

(04:04):
specifies frying balls of cheesy dough in hot oil, and
another that describes spiraling a thinned dough in oil to
create these coiled pastries that would then be coated with honey.
The Chinese poem Summoning the Soul, written in the third
century BC, also speaks of fried honey cakes, and the
Arabic world has long loved and written down recipes for

(04:26):
sweets that start with a fried dough base as well.
There are fritters and similar delights mentioned all through the
one thousand and one Night's Folk Tales. Evidence of a
fifteen hundred BC fossilized acorn cake was discovered in Oklahoma
in the nineteen twenties, and what was unique about that
discovery was that it was a round cake with a
hole in the center, and the archaeologist who made that

(04:49):
find et No, believed that the whole was likely there
so that the cakes could be stored in suspension as
a way to keep animals from eating them. But as
that discovery became public news and media picked it up,
the popular opinion became that Renault had clearly discovered an
early donut. So it's a good time to talk about
what a donut is by definition, and that is a

(05:12):
harder question than you may imagine. The most common response
is usually something along the lines of a deep fried
dough ball, and that is one way to classify it.
But there have also been waffle iron style doughnut makers
and doughnut pans so that home donutmakers can pop them
in the oven. Those are really more like cakes that
are shaped like doughnuts than what most folks would consider

(05:35):
a true donut. But then there are also cake doughnuts,
which use making powder rather than yeast as their leavening agent.
And while the donut in its circular shape with a
hole in the middle is a very US centric treat,
there have been as we said, fried dowed suites all
over the world four centuries so. For example, in India,
jube are a common treat. They're made by swirling battery

(05:58):
in hot oil and then and they are soaked in
warm syrup for several minutes. And desserts very similar to
julet can be found throughout the Middle East and in
some parts of Africa as well, and their lineage goes
all the way back to the Middle Ages. Fritters of
various kinds have been part of the sweets of Europe
going back hundreds of years as well. Many of these
are based on what's called a shoe paste, and that's

(06:20):
a simple dough made with flower water, sometimes egg and
possibly butter. There's not a leavening agent involved. That's how
beign Yet's started out in France, but as they migrated
to the southern United States, yeast entered the recipe and
they took on the more pillowy characteristics that they're known
for today. Yeah, it would have been less puffy and
airy the way they are now in its original form.

(06:41):
Another favorite fried dough, especially for Disney Park fans, is
the turo. So uros are normally made also with a
shoe paste dough, and while they're closely associated with Latin
American culture, it's more likely that their roots are actually
in China. So the Chinese version was savory, was assalted
fried dough that Portuguese merchants discovered while they were traveling

(07:03):
in Asia, and then when those merchants got home, they
tried to replicate the Chinese food, but they opted to
sweeten it up. And then the turo, named after Tura sheep,
started to look more like what we know it today. Uh.
And then that was picked up by the shepherds of
Spain because that was a pretty easy food that they
could make while they were out in the pastures for
long periods of time and with minimal ingredients that were

(07:25):
easy to carry with them. So from Spain, the curo
spread to South America, where the stuffed versions became standard
in both savory and sweet iterations. I will go on
record as saying I love a savory turro like there's
no tomorrow. Here in the US, donuts are abundance, and
there is certainly a tradition of fried dough in Native
American cultures. But the pastry that we normally call a

(07:47):
doughnut and the whole local donut shop since has its
roots in the Netherlands. When Dutch colonists made their way
to the New World, especially New Amsterdam, the capital of
the New Nettling Netherlands colony at the time, they brought
with them a deep fried suite known as ali kix.
This translates to oily cakes because of the way they

(08:09):
were prepared. The US mythology around donuts grew from there.
So Elizabeth Gregory is kind of a prominent figure in
the story of donuts in the US, particularly in New England.
So her son Hanson Gregory was a ship captain, and
Elizabeth took advantage of the spices that he often carried,
particularly cinnamon and nutmeg, and combined them with dough and

(08:30):
lemon rind to deep fry a delicious pastry that also
allegedly kept scurvy at bay. And her story is also
one of the sources that people use as the advent
of the word doughnut, as she put nuts in the
center of the pastries as well, uh usually walnuts or
hazel nuts, according to lore, but Hansen always claimed that
he was the one who really revolutionized the donut by

(08:53):
poking a hole in the center. Late in his life,
he told the press that he had just used a
round tin to cut a hole, but even so, exactly
why he did as a matter of greater debate. He
might have done it to stretch the ingredients a little
bit further because his mother was making these treats for
the crew as well, that way they could all have
them on voyages. Or he may have done it so

(09:13):
he could hang his pastry on one of the spokes
of the ship's wheel to keep it handy while he
was working. That is the story I heard in my childhood,
and I was always like, but that doesn't make sense,
because it's only gonna, yeah, only gonna stick there until
you turn the wheel, and then if you take a
bite out of it, it's not going to stay there anymore. Yeah.
I guess if you're on very steady seas and you

(09:34):
want to maybe stack some for like your you're a
long time standing at the wheel, maybe, but yeah, those
you would have to take one off stuff it in
your mouth otherwise than you're still standing there holding a
sticky pastry. Um. Donuts became a commonly baked item in
US kitchens in the second half of the nineteenth century,

(09:55):
but the initial surge in the donuts popularity in the
US is actually pretty closely to World War One. So
during the war, the Salvation Army had women volunteers baking
donuts in huge quantities to deliver to US soldiers station
in France, even delivering them directly two men on the
front lines. So these young women that were carrying donuts
out two soldiers were nicknamed dough girls or doe lasses,

(10:19):
and the combination of young women and baked goods really
did help morale and it left a lasting impression on
the soldiers. So when the war ended, the men who
came back sought donuts in their own neighborhood. Coming up,
we will talk about how donuts went from this whole
baked good to a whole industry, But before we do that,
we will take a quick break and here from one
of the sponsors that keeps us going. As demand for bakery,

(10:47):
made donuts, grew one enterprising man at off, Levett changed everything.
And Levitt's story doesn't exactly start out a massive success.
He was a Russian born immigrant who moved with his
parents to the U s and tend three at the
age of eight, and he didn't get much formal schooling
because his family was poor and he had to start
working when he was tended to help keep things afloat.

(11:09):
He taught himself as much as he could by reading
books on his own, and as a young man he
was pretty ambitious. He was really hard working. He opened
up a series of businesses and worked in retail for
a long time, but none of those efforts were really successful.
When he was thirty seven, Lovett moved from Milwaukee to
New York and started a bakery there. He started making
donuts to accommodate this post war rise in their popularity,

(11:31):
but he got some complaints from the adjacent businesses about
the fumes from the deep briar. He brainstormed a machine
that could do the job without making so many fumes,
and eventually met an engineer on the train, got to
talking and explained the idea to him. This machine was
comprehensive in its design because it mixed the dough, formed
it into ringlets drop them into oil, flipped them and

(11:52):
then pulled them out of the oil and onto a
conveyor belt. Finally they landed in a basket to be served. Yeah.
It's also to note that there's no point where the
doughnut gets the whole punched in it. It's actually formed
as a ring. That's something people maybe don't always know. Uh.
It took a dozen tries at making this machine before

(12:12):
it worked properly, but once it did in it was
an instant hit. Levitt did not hide his donut maker
in the back. He displayed it in the window and
it drew onlookers who also came in to buy donuts
and at off Lovett finally found success. He became known
as the Donut King, and his bakery, the Mayflower Coffee Shop,
was replicated throughout the country and under his company, the

(12:36):
Donut Corporation of America, his doughnut machines, as well as
donut mixes to use in them, were being shipped all
over the world. Donut machines were on display at the
Chicago World's Fair and they were lauded as an emblem
of the century. They were inexpensive enough that most people
could afford one, and they were made via automation, so
they seemed really futuristic. Yeah, this is you know, depression times,

(12:58):
so it was pretty exciting that you could get a
really yummy treat for a few cents that made you
feel like you were part of the country's progress into
future technologies. And around this same time, a man named
Joe Lebou, who was a French chef from New Orleans,
sold his donut recipe, which was just handwritten out on
a piece of paper and the name Crispy Kreme that

(13:19):
he used for it, to a man named Ishmael Armstrong
in Paduca, Kentucky, and Armstrong made donuts up based on
this recipe in batches and he had his nephew sell
those donuts door to door. But after mediocre sales in Paduca,
Armstrong moved to Nashville to open a donut shop there,
but soon he sold that business to his brother and
he went back to Kentucky. In seven his nephew, Vernon

(13:42):
Rudolph made donuts with Lebo's recipe and sold them in
Winston Salem, North Carolina with friends in a grassroots effort
to try to expand with the company business. Vernon and
his friends have been traveling for a bit trying to
find the right spot, and they were so broke that
when they started up in North Carolina, they had to
borrow the ingredients for their first batches of donuts. They
sold mostly to grocers, but the scent of baked, freshly

(14:05):
glazed donuts lured people to the bakery space that they rented,
so he started selling directly to the customers. Within a decade,
he had expanded to have donut shops in seven states
and still totally attract people by the fact that it
there is a Hot Donuts Now sign informing you that
there are hot donuts now. Yes, even the Dalai Lama

(14:27):
Eats Crispy Creez. The closest ones to me are in
New York City at I think Union Station. But they're
not like, there's not a donut friar. They're they're shipped
in from somewhere, which is not really the same. Um.
So when we were out on the West Coast for
our tour last year, I was taking a car from
the hotel that I had stayed into the ferry terminal

(14:49):
and we passed a crispy cream with the hot Donuts
now sign on, and I was almost like stop right here.
Then I was afraid I would miss my ferry. And
then I missed my ferry anyway, and I knew I
had made it and you had of donuts. Yep, I
had no donut. It's no good. In eight National Donut
Day was born, and that was a fundraising initiative that
was launched by the Salvation Army to harken back to

(15:10):
the World War One efforts of the women volunteers who
brought donuts to soldiers and also to remember their work,
and the tradition of delivering donuts to men in combat
continued in World War Two. Both the Salvation Army and
the Red Cross ran wartime donut morale programs. In ninety four,
Life Magazine ran a story on the donut morale effort
with the tagline donuts will Win the War. While it

(15:33):
undoubtedly helped some soldiers maintain a connection to home during
tough times, it also was excellent for the donuts image
around the world and back home, as this pastry came
to be associated with the war effort, volunteerism, and cheer.
They also talked about them on The Great British Bakeoff.
These were the donut dollies. Yes, after they were on

(15:54):
that show, people ask us to do a podcast about them.
Krispy Kreme's Vernon Rudolph shipped out to fight in the war.
When he came home, he went right back to making donuts.
He developed a new donut machine that came to be
known as the ring King, and he also made a
ring King Junior that could be used in smaller retail spaces.
The ring King Junior could turn out about sixty dozen

(16:14):
donuts an hour, and modern donut machines can make eight
hundred dozen donuts an hour. The Smithsonian has a ring
King Junior, and the National Museum of American History. Yeah,
I think it is not on display. It's part of
the archives that are not out for visitors. But it's there,
and there's a page about it on their website, which
is going to be in our show notes. And as

(16:36):
Rudolph was perfecting his machine to make all those dozens
of donuts, another major player in the donut game opened
its first shop. Bill Rosenberg. Duncan Donuts debuted in Quincy, Massachusetts,
in nineteen fifty and five years later, it started franchising
and grew into the behemoth it is today. Duncan has
stores in forty six countries worldwide. Uh and there are

(16:57):
more than twelve thousand different locations. Yeah, well, I have
to go to New York City to get a shipped
in Crispykreme donut. If I want a donut from Duncan,
I'm always like four feet from one. I the first
time that my husband spent any substantial time in Manhattan,
he was like, are people really afraid that they might

(17:18):
have to walk a block without a donut? There really
isn't Duncan on almost every other block, which is pretty funny. So,
as we alluded to earlier, there's a whole other story
about donuts and drama in the United States, and we
will jump into that right after we pause for a
quick sponsor break. So while I was researching this episode,

(17:41):
I started looking at old digitized stories from the New
York Times, which is one of my favorite things, and
I stumbled across this interesting pattern. Starting in nineteen thirteen,
there were full on debates happening in the letter section
about whether cruelers could be considered donuts and which pastry
was superior, and I honestly had no idea this was
so hotly debated. As Tracy mentioned earlier, Yes, people will

(18:03):
argue about anything forever, but I just did not know
the level of fervor with the crullers versus donut situation
had happened. Um. While I never managed to find the
original article which The Times published that kicked off a
lot of this debate, I did find one, dated December one.
It was a letter from William L. Henry. And that
letter to the editor is brief, and it reads quote

(18:25):
one way of stating the question is is a donut
ever a crueler? In other words, I defy you to
find any agreement of authorities so that one may know
whether these two terms define the shape or the materials
out of which both delicacies are made. Perhaps your correspondence
will rush to the defense of their own favorite nomenclature,
and some standard usage may be discovered. To put my

(18:46):
question another way, does the whole itself determine the baptismal name?
Two days later, a letter from reader Casey put forth
the following opinion quote an old New England housewife and
the vintage of forty eight and a descendant of the
mayflower feels able to speak authoritatively on the donut crullers question.
The donut is born of leisure and forethought, the child

(19:07):
of silence and slow time, being raised with yeast set
in sponge overnight behind the kitchen stove, needed in the morning,
and left to rise again before being fried. The crueler
is a creature of impulse, quickly stirred together, raised with
baking powder it or its equivalent, and fried upon the
spur of the moment. The donut is a nobler nutriment
and was the fair of the Pilgrims, But the swift

(19:30):
and humble crueler had his place in this hurrying, progressive time.
By the way, I did not find any evidence that
Pilgrims eight donuts. No, I don't. I don't want a dog,
Miss Casey with her knowledge, But I don't think the
Pilgrims said, don't. I. I am just thinking about how

(19:50):
my mother made donuts, which was to buy a can
like a tube of biscuits from the refrigerator, section, shape
it into a donut shape, and deep fry it in
the fried Daddy fryar that we had in the kitchen.
That sounds delicious. It was put powdered sugar on it.
The powdered sugar on everything. I don't I don't know
why that would even be a question um. This letter

(20:12):
was quickly followed up by reader J. L. A. Fowler,
who wrote, quote, crawler and doughnut are of the same
family and have names to distinguish them. Only doughnut is
a common name, but the word crawler is a dignified, refined,
an appropriate name. A doughnut is a ball of dough,
while a crawler is the same dough rolled thin cut
in strips with a slit cut lengthwise in the center,

(20:34):
with one end turned through the slit, producing the familiar hole.
The debate seems to die down for a bit, and
then there was a lengthy letter from nineteen thirty three
titled donut holes in the Crawler. Reader VH. Pen responded
to a suggestion that the size of the doughnut holes
needs to be regulated. Pen's letter is full of punnury
and word play, and it doesn't seem especially serious, but

(20:56):
it's content outlines the fact that we should just ditch
nuts altogether and switched to the far superior cralor, which
will solve the problem. Automatically. Pen writes, quote, the cruler
form of the pastry is really superior to the donut
in many ways and taste, the difference is nil. The
crawlers usually have a sugarcoating that few donuts possess. In design. However,

(21:18):
the donuts form and function are traceable only to the
prosaic life preserver, while the crawler, deriving its motif from
the cute twisted columns of Spanish architecture, is authentic and artistic. Pensays,
the best thing about crawlers is how they how good
they are for dunking. I love the curlers are described
as authentic and artistic. I absolutely love that. So that

(21:43):
brings us to dunking, which we got to talk about
for a minute, because dunking ones donut in coffee or
tea or cocoa or milk or whatever tickles your fancy began,
according to legend, by accident. Popular actress May Murray accidentally
dropped her donut into her coffee at a New York restaurant,
which restaurant is a matter of debate. Uh. And after

(22:04):
fishing that pastry out, she took a bite and proclaimed
it delightful. And as she was one of the most
popular actresses of the nineteen twenties. This started a craze
as everyone started dunking their donuts to emulate the starlet. So,
talking about ramping up the donut crueler debate of the
earlier early twentieth century, we also need to talk about
the National Dunking Association. This was an organization started in

(22:28):
the nineteen thirties by none other than Adolf Levitt's Donut
Corporation of America, and it was a cute way to
promote donuts and give customers a fun club to belong to.
The group didn't seem to take itself especially seriously. It
always named a comedian as its president. Red Skelton, Jimmy Durranty,
and Johnny Carson all served as head of the organization
at various times. The back of the membership card for

(22:51):
the National Dunking Association read dunka donut and be merry,
and it included the text of what it called the
Optimists Creed, which read as you ramble on through life, brother,
whatever be your goal, keep your eye upon the donut
and not upon the whole. There were also guidelines on
the card for dunking which read quote, the National Dunking
Association respectfully requests all members to observe the official dunking rules.

(23:16):
Splashing is taboo. Any member caught getting his fingers wet
will be subject to suspension. With that, we wish you
happy dunking, and when you dunk, be sure you dunk.
Donuts identified with the official Seal of Tested Quality for delightfully,
delicious and winningly wholesome donuts enjoyed by millions of people.
But those guidelines were just an abbreviation of the official

(23:37):
Club Dunking Guide. So the longer form guide cautions amateurs
about not getting too cocky because watching a professional dunker
can make it look easy. Uh. And then it outlines
an eight step guide to perfect dunking, which included, and
this is again abbreviated, one tuck and napkin under your
chin to break your donut in half. Three, pick up

(23:58):
the donut carefully and keep the fingers that are not
holding the donut up and out of the way. Four
quote swish the donut rhythmically in the beverage with a
free and easy movement of the entire arm. Five keep
the donut immersed for exactly two point five seconds. Six,
remove the donut from the liquid and let any excess
liquid drip back into your cup. Seven quote swerve the

(24:20):
donut in a graceful curve towards your mouth and close
your teeth tenderly over the dunked portion. And eight repeat
the above process until all the donuts on the table
are simply fond memories. There are also some admonishments about
being careful not to splash around, never trying to duck
a whole donut, and never getting your fingers wet. That's
all pretty hardcore about not making a mess for an

(24:42):
activity that's alleged to have started when a starlet dropped
a donut into her cut by accident. But still it's
written in this very cavalier, jaunty style that has a
little edge of wit. As duncan continued to be popular,
the debate over donut versus crueler revived periodically. In May,
then You Times ran a story about Major Helen Pervians,

(25:03):
who was one of the women who had supplied donuts
to soldiers in France during the First World War, and
the subheader on that article read major Perviance warns mere
crueler won't do but in the actual article. The only
distinction that she really makes is that donuts have holes
and cruelers do not, and she made very clear in
her interview with the newspaper that the soldiers preferred donuts.

(25:25):
In n one, the AP ran an article about the
National Dunking Association. They had written to the Federal Security Administrator,
Paul V. McNutt, who please step in and have the
Food and Drag Administration make an authoritative ruling on the matter.
McNutt was convinced that a dictionary definition could be used
to settle the matter without the US government getting involved.

(25:46):
There was an interesting outcome to this request. The National
Dunkers Association asked McNutt to become an honorary member, and
he accepted, but that meant that there was still debate
because they had not gotten their government ling. So on
October ninety one, The Times ran a letter written by
Burton Evans, vice president of the National Dunking Association, And

(26:08):
as an aside, Nevian's name comes up a lot, and
he was actually a publicist that was hired to get
donuts in the public eye, and he was clearly really
good at that job. In his letter to the editor,
Nevin's tries to present quote the dunker's side of the situation.
He first states the association is a quote bona fide
organization which is non commercial and non political. At that point,

(26:30):
the group had more than a million members. He went
on to say, quote our reason for seeking assistance from
Administrator McNutt is that donuts are called crawlers, and many
sections of the country, especially throughout Pennsylvania, by laws of
our organization, call for the dunking of donuts and not
crawlers or any other outlaw cakes. And naturally, many of

(26:51):
our members have complained that they have had difficulty in
practicing their dunking properly. I will forever look at a
crawler and call it an outlaw CAKEE going for uh.
He goes on to say that the whole in the
donut is the key, and that quote crawlers, coffee cake,
lady fingers, and other items are conducive to sloppy technique

(27:11):
and do not enable one to get the real enjoyment
out of the art of dunking. Nevin's concludes by saying
that the matter will be brought up at the annual
convention a few weeks later, and that they will then
petition all dictionary publishers to help, and he ends with
the quote, if that fails, we shall probably seek government aid.
In December, the Times ran yet another donut or crueler article.

(27:35):
This one discussed the many letters they had received on
the matter, and also included a quote from Burton Evins,
who was credited as the director of the National Dunking Association. Yeah,
he was actually the vice president. I'm not sure why
they listed him as director, but there you go. Uh.
Nevin's gave The Times the following quote on the matter, quote,
The question of the difference between the donut and the

(27:56):
crueler came up at our annual convention three years ago
and was settled for all time, at least we thought so.
They had in the end gone with shape. The crueler
was an elongated, twisted piece of dough. The donut was
a round cake with a hole in the middle, per
their definition. And that same article, Ted Robinson of the
Cleveland Plane Dealer discussed that what he did and didn't

(28:17):
believe constituted a donut based on all the evidence, and
then it said, quote, but usage is the law of
language and will finally win over rule and precedent and correctness.
Crawlers and fried cakes are called donuts by the population,
so it is silly to hold out for purism. I
am content to call them all donuts all that is,
except those monstrosities with jelly inside them. Later that month,

(28:42):
Kenneth Wiggins Porter wrote The Times on the matter, and
first he mentioned that he had long been keeping up
with this debate that played out in the paper over
what is and isn't a donut, And then Porter shared
his unique experience of what he and his family often
made when he was growing up in Kansas, and how
he did not grow up with the same nomenclature for
the fried dough pastries so that the bakers of Manhattan

(29:03):
seemed to. He was startled when he discovered that what
they were calling colors were an item that his family
had only ever called tangle bridges, and he closed with
a question about whether anyone else had ever heard of
such an alternate name, or if maybe it was just
his family. I never found any evidence that anyone wrote
back about tangle bridges. In any case, there does not

(29:25):
seem to have been any official ruling on what is
or isn't a donut. The National Dunkers Association disbanded at
some point, but it's a little unclear when that happened.
And there are certainly some regional differences and what people
call various baked goods and various other things and various
other words. And I'm like, everyone, just chill out. Yeah,

(29:47):
that will go on and on and on forever. I
will tell a slightly embarrassing story of how it took
me probably twelve years of marriage before I figured out
what Brian meant when he said a chocolate donut was
like a regular doughnut with chocolate icing, and not a
chocolate cake doughnuts. And it came to be this thing

(30:08):
where like our friends, we would walk into a donut
shop and they would all get tense because they knew
I would always get Brian the wrong donut. Mess it up.
It's fine, we've figured it out now. But for the record,
in more modern discussion of the matter, crawlers, it is
pointed out, can actually exist in two different forms. One
is a hand twisted cake doughnut, but there are also

(30:29):
curlors made with shoe paste, like we mentioned earlier in
the episode, those are unleavened, and in the book Doughnut
a Global History, which was one of my sources for
this author Heather de Lancey Hunwick is very clear that
the shoe paste crawlors do not count as donuts, but
the twisted cake ones do. Donut or e h, do
you have some listener mail? I do. Uh. This is

(30:52):
from our listener Megan, or perhaps she pronounces it Megan.
Either way, I'm not sure, she writes. Dear Tracy and Hanley,
thank you so much for the wonderful show. You pretty
My best friend introduced me to the concept of podcast
when I was complaining about how boring driving to all
my residency interviews in my fourth year of medical school. Was.
Since then, nearly two years ago, you guys have kept
me company during road trips, moves, chores, and my constant

(31:14):
knitting projects, even on people and subjects I've heard about before,
like dr Apgar. I always learned something new, of course
I I love to share these cool tidbits I learned
from you, to the point where one of my co
workers playfully bellowed at me, how do you know stuff
about everything? Of course I don't, but I do love
constantly learning. More so, keep up the good work. Um

(31:34):
When I'm always sort of in awe by people who
gets through medical school and go on to have careers
in medicine. So kudos Megan, and thank you for the
lovely postcard, which is a really beautiful piece of Japanese
art and we appreciate it. Um. It is from the
Honolulu Museum of Art from the Edo period and it's
absolutely beautiful, So thank you, thank you for that. If

(31:57):
you would like to write to us, you can do
so at History podcast at how stuff works dot com.
You can also find us everywhere on social media as
Missed in History and Missed in History dot com is
also our website address, but you can find every single
episode of the show that has ever existed. Uh, you
might want to subscribe to the show, that would be grand,
and you could do that on the I heart Radio app,
at Apple podcasts, or wherever else you listen to podcasts.

(32:24):
Stuffy Missed in History Class is a production of I
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