The doughnut is something as quintessentially American as apple pie but yet it isn’t American at all nor is it – as some jews like to claim – a ‘jewish invention’. This latter claim really comes from the (false) claim that the first doughnut making machine was invented by a jew from Russia Adolph Levitt in 1920 which has been widely repeated and believed. (1) I will cover this claim as well as why it is false in a separate article.
However, focusing on doughnuts themselves as the website ‘Germany in USA’ points out the first recorded mention of a modern jam-filled (or jelly-filled if you want to use the Americanism) doughnut is from medieval Germany where the doughnut appears as ‘Gefüllte Krapfen’ in the 1485 printed cookbook from Nuremberg called ‘Küchenmeisterei’ (lit. ‘Mastery of the Kitchen’) and was one of the very first printed books ever to come off of Johannes Gutenberg’s famous printing press. (2)
The fact that they appear in an early surviving cookbook from 1485 suggests that the doughnut had likely been being made in German lands long before 1485 for how long we don’t know precisely but likely a hundred years plus.
But how did a German sweet treat get to America?
Well, it was via the Dutch in the seventh century – remember ‘New York’ started out life as ‘New Amsterdam’ and it is also worth noting that the Dutch inhabitants of ‘New Amsterdam’ despised jews for quite rational reasons and refused to let them settle in their new colony – (3) as Tori Avey explains:
‘Doughnuts are deep-fried cakes with a long European history and roots in still earlier Middle Eastern cuisine. They were introduced to America by the Dutch in New Netherlands to America as oliekoecken (oil cakes or fried cakes). Made of yeast dough rich in eggs and butter, spices, and dried fruits, their sweetness came from the fruit and the final dusting of sugar. The dough was often somewhat sticky (additional flour toughened and masked the spicy and buttery flavors) and was dropped as blobs off the end of a spoon into hot rapeseed oil (canola). The resulting doughnuts took the form of irregular balls, at some point called oliebollen, or oil (fried) balls. They were eaten during the dutch Christmas season, which extended through New Year’s through Twelfth Night (January 6), and for special occasions throughout the year.’ (4)
And David Taylor confirms in ‘Smithsonian Magazine’:
‘Of course doughnuts in some form or other have been around so long that archaeologists keep turning up fossilized bits of what look like doughnuts in the middens of prehistoric Native American settlements. But the doughnut proper (if that's the right word) supposedly came to Manhattan (then still New Amsterdam) under the unappetizing Dutch name of olykoeks--"oily cakes."
Fast-forward to the mid-19th century and Elizabeth Gregory, a New England ship captain's mother who made a wicked deep-fried dough that cleverly used her son's spice cargo of nutmeg and cinnamon, along with lemon rind. Some say she made it so son Hanson and his crew could store a pastry on long voyages, one that might help ward off scurvy and colds. In any case, Mrs. Gregory put hazelnuts or walnuts in the center, where the dough might not cook through, and in a literal-minded way called them doughnuts.’ (5)
Put another it was via the Dutch that the United States got the doughnut, and it was from the English that the United States got the ring doughnut.
But what of Avey’s remark that the doughnut has ‘roots in still earlier Middle Eastern cuisine’?
Well, the doughnut – as in a doughball/cake of dough fried in fat - is widely-believed by food historians to be one of the first convenient sweet treats ever created by humans and to date back to Neolithic times (6) with the first human reference to it being from ancient Egypt in the form of a wall-painting on the tomb of a vizier named Rekhmire who served Pharaoh Thutmose III which places the first recorded mentioned of a doughnut-type treat in the 1400s B.C. (7) long before the possible mention of a doughnut-type treat in Leviticus 7:12 and suggesting that the Israelites nicked the idea from the Egyptians. (8)
The Greeks and Romans also had their versions of course (9) which then eventually ends up in the ‘Gefüllte Krapfen’ in Nuremberg in 1485.
Thus we can see that the doughnut is most certainly not jewish and in both its modern forms – jam/jelly-filled and ring – it is German and English respectively despite having a general pedigree as a sweet treat going all the way back to the Egyptians and Mesolithic times.
References
(1) For example: https://www.envoyglobal.com/insight/the-history-of-the-doughnut-in-america/; https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-history-of-the-doughnut-150405177/; https://www.gffoodservice.com.au/resource/a-history-of-doughnuts/
(2) https://germanyinusa.com/2019/04/30/doughnuts-a-german-creation-from-the-1400s/
(3) On this see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/peter-stuyvesant-new-amsterdam-and
(4) https://toriavey.com/the-history-of-doughnuts/
(5) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-history-of-the-doughnut-150405177/
(6) Heather Delancey Hunwick, 2015, ‘Doughnut: A Global History’, 1st Edition, Reaktion Books: London, pp. 24-25
(7) Ibid., p. 26
(8) Ibid., pp. 26-27
(9) Ibid. 27-29