I have a book that asserts that the word doughnut has different meanings in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Norman Moss, What’s the difference?: An American/British-British/American Dictionary (Hutchinson & Co (Publishers) Ltd London 1973).
American/British (p. 17)
doughnut,n—a ring-shaped pastry with a distinctive flavour. It is different entirely from a British doughnut, and not as sweet. It has no filling.
British/American (p. 87)
doughnut,n—a round, sweet pastry, with sugar on the outside and jam or cream inside. It is quite different from an American doughnut.
So far as I can remember, these two types have always been understood as “doughnuts” in America in my lifetime. The supposed British doughnut we might call a “filled doughnut,” but if we speak generally of doughnuts, we intend to include both kinds.
Does anyone recall a time in their lives, or have references that indicate, that in whatever dialect, only one of these meanings would be understood and the other would have to be explained or considered a “foreign” thing?
It does seem to me that in old American movies, if doughnuts were to make an appearance, they were always in the form indicated by this book as the American doughnut. Maybe the filled doughnut became part of the standard meaning of doughnut some time after the black-and-white era?
To me, as an American, “do(ugh)nut shape” = the ring/torus shape with a hole in the middle. But not all donuts are donut-shaped. You also have jelly donuts, etc. that are not topologically equivalent to donut-shaped donuts.
There’s a difference between the Platonic ideal of a donut, and all the different varieties you might get in a box of assorted donuts.
Donuts may either be cake donuts or yeast donuts, and they may or may not have glaze, frosting, sprinkles, etc.
I’ve never seen a distinction in American English that would result in the British type not being called doughnuts. As someone who bakes and who worked in a donut shop 40 years ago, in American English, the distinction is typically between cake donuts and yeast donuts.
There are, however, doughnut-type treats that I’ve never seen called “doughnuts” - but they aren’t sold in donut shops. They are sold in ethnic bakeries/restaurants/coffee shops. I suppose if the British author of that book had come to say NYC in the 60s, it’s not impossible that the only filled doughnuts he may have seen were Fasnachtsküchle , paczki , zeppole or some other ethnic version - or that he was going by what he saw on supermarket shelves and didn’t see any filled doughnuts at all.
Quite so. Various pastries, cakes, or rolls and the like from other countries are often called ‘donuts’ as a way to describe them to Americans (and maybe Brits too). Malasadas are often called ‘Portuguese donuts’ as another example. Donuts are known by their common form of a ring shaped cake and also include other forms commonly made and sold with them. It’s not unique to donuts, one can say they are going to McDonalds to get burgers and also return with some chicken sandwiches too.
Highly unlikely. I grew up in New York in the 1950s, and the Italian bakery we got our rolls from had jelly donuts exactly like this (usually with strawberry or raspberry jam). Pretty much any diner that had donut-shaped donuts also had jelly donuts. (I don’t recall if there were also custard-filled donuts back then, but it seems to me there were.) Jelly donuts by that name were ubiquitous and a standard kind of donut.
I didn’t say it was likely - just not impossible. Although I must say I have never seen jelly doughnuts in an Italian bakery in my life ( the closest would be filled zeppole or sfinge - but they are filled with custard or cannoli cream, not jelly ) - I’m a bit younger than you, so it may have been common in the '50s or it could be a matter of different neighborhoods.
Like I said, pretty much every diner in New York would have had had jelly donuts at that time, so it’s effectively impossible.
I grew up in an Irish-Italian neighborhood, with significant numbers of Germans and others. The Italian bakery was pretty much “the” bakery for the neighborhood. While they carried Italian specialties, they also catered to neighborhood tastes. They sold German-style poppy-seed Kaiser rolls, and crullers of this type.. (I see that this seems to be the most common type of “cruller” today, a French type.)
It’s true that today “Italian” bakeries might specialize more in Italian-type pastries. But the fact that even an Italian bakery in the 1950s would carry the standard jelly donut just shows how ubiquitous they were.
Exactly: eclairs, maple bars, bismarcks, profiteroles, and traditional round donuts (fried or baked, filled or not) are all donuts, as far as I’m concerned.
In World War I, so 1914-1918 timeframe, US troops were called “doughboys”.
Wiki notes that there’s some possible connection to US women auxiliaries making and delivering doughnuts to the troops. Though that’s not the favored etymology.
In all the pix I’ve ever see of all those events the doughnuts look like a plain cake doughnut with no frosting, filling, or sugar.
Perhaps the origin of the idea that US “doughnut” = unadorned unsweet dates from back then and the OP’s 1970’s book is just repeating old 1910s lore that had become obsolete by the 1950s as the modern sweet elaborate varieties of US doughnut developed?
I don’t really see jelly donuts much at all, to the point I was unaware they were never ring shaped. I always think of the ring shaped pastry when I hear the word donut.
I was just thinking about twist(ed) donuts (doughnuts) which are long and not round.
That said, I always make sure to clarify what the bakery or supermarket defines as a donut, especially when you’re buying a box of a dozen for a set price. Some places consider all of the above and filled whatever, as donuts, other places don’t.
Then there’s andagi = Okinawan donut, which is a round ball (if you’re lucky with a crispy tail of dough) that’s somewhat cake donut-like, but less sweet and denser. For me, a true andagi should bounce off the floor without breaking!
According to the Smithsonian Magazine’shistory of the doughnut, the “nut” part originated in the mid-1800s, when a ship captain’s mother put hazelnuts or walnuts in the center because they didn’t cook through. The ship captain supposedly eliminated the nut to create the doughnut hole. However, other sources propose an earlier origin for the name.
Jelly donuts have been around for centuries in the form of the German berliner or bismark. However, according to Wiki they have been called “jelly donuts” in the US at least since 1942, citing a headline that read “Jelly Doughnut Diets Harmful to War Effort.”
For what it’s worth, in the 1950s my mother used to make donuts by deep-frying balls of dough about two inches in diameter, with no hole, then dusting them with confectioners sugar. I’m not sure where she got the recipe from.
Actually, it seems that doughnut goes back to 1809, in Knickerbocker’s History of New York. It sounds like the earliest doughnuts were a lot like the ones my mother used to make, round balls of dough with no hole. The hole was acquired about 50 years later.
At some point the term was extended to cover other pastries, eventually including the berliner as a “jelly donut.”
This is fascinating. I’ve never been to a place that sells donuts and did not sell jelly donuts (around here it is usually actually raspberry jelly, some sort of lemon curd, and mediocre “bavarian cream”). I’ve also never gotten a box of “mixed donuts” that didn’t contain filled jelly donuts, as well as “long johns” (rectangular donuts, sometimes filled) and braids (same material as your standard yeast ring donut, stretched and twisted before frying). If I specifically wanted a standard yeast ring donut, I would have to specify that if I was sending somebody out for them, otherwise I might end up with nearly anything…
Oh, you’re making me hungry…and I just ate supper.
How about ‘sticks’ aka cruellers? Not the french style (we called those tractor tires), but ones that were either piped that way to begin with (cake batter) or (my favorites) when you grabbed a yeast ring shaped doughnut and pulled and twisted it into a longish blob?
They all came under the header of ‘doughnuts’ around here in Massachusetts. As in, if you were picking out doughnuts for a box of a dozen, you could include any of those in the mix.
And tractor tires… Growing up, there was a commercial bakery (“Old Home”) that supplied local convenience stores in the Black Hills with what it just called “old fashioned donuts”, that were the classic tractor tire/cruller shape (and what I meant if I ever asked anybody to grab me some “tractor tires” while they were out)… they tasted like heaven to me, for whatever reason. They appear to have disappeared over the years, and I think the world is a slightly darker place for their loss.
