If I’d seen that post, I wouldn’t have written mine, but by then I was busy typing. There was this little independent place around Arlington that made raisin-spice sticks/braids/whatever that I swear were the BEST doughnuts in the world.
Sounds like a variation on beignets.
Would doughnuts and bagels be an example of “convergent evolution”?
And their cousin the bundt cake.
They were much denser than the beignets I’ve had in France or New Orleans. As far as I can tell, they were almost identical to Dutch olliebollen (which is I guess a type of beignet.), except my mother didn’t put fruit in them, but flavored them with a little nutmeg. These sound like the original kind of Dutch donut referred to in 1809. I don’t believe I’ve seen them elsewhere in the US.
The toroidal shape does serve the same purpose, in making cooking more even, although bagels are boiled and baked, while donuts are traditionally fried in oil.
Where do Apple Fritters and Cinnamon Rolls fall? I buy them when I buy doughnuts along with everything else mentioned. Doughnut just encompasses so many wonderful things.
But do you put a flower pot in the hole in the bundt cake?
Fritters are donuts. Cinnamon rolls are pastries.
Here’s a recipe for the kind of doughnuts I’ve always known in the UK -fried, yeast-risen, ball-shaped, filled and sugar-dusted:
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/doughnut-dough
But we are also very familiar now with Krispy Kreme and similar iced and ring-shaped creations. If anything, mass-produced jam doughnuts might well be thought of as old-fashioned and a bit downmarket.
Could Subway sandwiches (and in particular, the rolls) be a kind of doughnut?
I think it’s the frying that makes a donut a donut; not the sugar.
So deep-fried battered onion rings are a kind of doughnut?
There was a thread some time back in CS that tried to define pasta. It turned out to be difficult to reduce it to a simple explanation because there were so many ways different foodstuffs are turned into noodles and dough that can’t be clearly distinguished from the foods most commonly known as pasta.
Batter isn’t dough.
Donuts can be made from batter.
Once a week, when I’m grocery shopping, I buy myself and my husband each one donut from the grocery store’s bakery to get our fix. I texted him the other night when I was in the store - donut? He texted back - yes. So I bought my most favorite raised donut with chocolate frosting and I picked out a bismark (jelly donut) for him (which is one of his faves). When I got home he looked in the bag and said, “I thought you were getting me a donut”! Apparently, to him, donuts are the things with holes in the middle and nothing else. Cake donuts, raised donuts, donut holes, bismarks, long johns, cinnamon twists, fried cinnamon rolls, apple fritters are all classified as a donut in my mind.
And here cola does not mean any carbonated beverage, it’s only used for a Coke or Pepsi type drink.
Ah, so your husband is evidence for support for the book’s definition of American doughnut.
According to the Google Ngram viewer, jelly doughnut seems to have started appearing in books around 1920 (and jelly donut around 1940). Doughnut is mentioned occasionally back to 1800, starting to become more common around 1860 (with the donut spelling again appearing around 1940).
As has been mentioned, jelly donuts existed before 1920, but they were called berliners or bismarks. I wonder if the change could have been influenced by anti-German sentiment after WWI?
Oddly enough, there was a video in my youtube feed of a Brit trying an American donut. At the 8.20 mark he asserts that donuts are not that common in the UK, FWIW. Warning it’s an 11 minute long and kind of pointless video.
We’ve been binge-watching the Hawaii Five-O reboot and they are always slogging down malasadas (cop joke?) and trying to pass them off as Hawai’ian.
Terrible old joke: Where were the first do-nuts fried? In Greece.