An Ode To An O
People who know me know that I love a donut now and then. In fact, you don't need to know me very well at all to know this, you only really need to see me in the same place where there are multiple donuts. The quarantine has temporarily closed my preferred donut place—the Donut King, which is indeed the monarch and ruler of all fried dough—but Des Moines responded to the crisis in style this weekend, with numerous places offering pop-up donut options on Sunday morning, including Bubba and Mars Cafe. Considering that I saw no fewer than 5 people I know coming, going or working at Bubba when I picked mine up on Sunday morning, this came as close to a brunch as I've had in two months.
Some credit for this must be given to Brad Magg, the industrious owner of Goldie's Ice Cream Shoppe in Prairie City, which held a spontaneous donut sale a few weeks ago that created so much traffic that there were actually enough people in Prairie City for it to qualify as a city. That got the ball rolling in Des Moines, which led to everyone I know getting donuts on Sunday, which led to this text from Dylan Lampe: "Can you write about doughnuts tomorrow? And how it drives me crazy that people don't spell it correctly? Then you can dive deep into the origin of doughnuts and somehow tie it to 1800s European history?"
Oh, Dylan, I'd be happy to. I can handle all of that except for why it drives you crazy that people spell it differently than you prefer, that's a matter for your therapist. Furthermore, I must confess, my friend, that I prefer to spell it "donut." I don't like extra gh's all over the place (Sorry, Hayleighs, Kayleighs, and, god forbid, Haighleighs and Kaighleighs), it takes longer to type and if it's good enough for the Donut King, to whom my fealty lies, it's good enough for me. Dylan is right in that doughnuts is the original spelling and most correct way to spell our favorite snack cake (though Oxford English Dictionary is AOK with donut as well).
The first known printed use of doughnut comes from Washington Irving in his 1809 History of New York, which described donut holes thusly: "An enormous dish of balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, and called doughnuts, or olykoeks.” Olykoek is a Dutch word that means "oily cake" and it from the Dutch where we get our modern donuts, brought to America when New York was still New Amsterdam in the 17th century. Something like a donut, by which I mean circular cakes of sweetened fried dough, date back for millennia. Fossilized bits of donuts are frequently found in the remains of Native American settlements (they can also be found in the creases of my car seats, I bet, but that's another story) but the Dutch get the credit here (though they get bad grades for product marketing—"oily cakes?" C'mon, guys).
Permit a short digression on the Dutch language. In these diseased times, you may enjoy taking up the art of Dutch swearing. The language of the Netherlands is soaked with insults based on diseases. Where we tell someone to fuck off, the Dutch tell them "optyfussen," literally "typhus off." A simple, elegant American "get fucked" turns into "krijg de tering" in Amsterdam, meaning "get consumption." Should you find an orange-clad bicyclist calling you a "kankerhoer," know that they've said you are not only a whore, but a whore with cancer. Should you get into an argument about the relative merits of Audrey Hepburn or Johan Cruyff, a Dutchman is liable to call you a pokkenteef, for being "a poxy bitch." Dutch is full of colorful insults like mierennueker, an expression for someone who gets bent out of shape over details, which literally means "ant fucker" (and, to be honest, I think Dylan is being a little bit of a mierennueker about the spelling of donut, it must be said). Insults are derived from social taboos, we just usually get ours from sex and poop, but the Dutch are hearty people, it's no wonder they take their insults from diseases. We are talking about a nation that formed a mob in 1672 and killed and ate their prime minister. Eating people for political purposes has always been a fringe exercise but it's said they served the prime minister with a peach glaze, which is where we get the word for impeachment.*
Regardless of its origins, a donut is more than just an oily cake. The English name comes from a 19th century mother of a ship captain named Elizabeth Gregory who made oily cakes for her son's crew because they were economical and could be made with ingredients found on board. To help them bake evenly, she cut out the holes in the middle and replaced them with hazelnuts or walnuts, which is where our beloved treats get both their signature look and the "nut" part of their name.
"Donut" was first used in the 1890s because ink ain't cheap, people, and businesses could save a few pennies by advertising an item with fewer letters. However, the use of that variant remained low until the 1950s when a New England chain of donut sellers, whose name advised people to dunk them in coffee, became popular.
And so the word is just one of those cultural divides that can't be bridged no matter how passionate either side becomes. The Scottish write "whisky" and the Irish and write "whiskey." Some people spell it "social distancing" others spell it "yell at legislators and nurses about 'liberating the country' while holding a gun and cosplaying as a tough guy to make up for their crippling insecurity." Tomato, tomahto, you know? Today, you are more likely to find the word spelled "doughnut" than "donut" but it is close, with "doughnut" enjoying a 60/40 advantage, but that has shrunk from 90/10 two generations ago. I am happy to be a voice for a growing minority. And I am even more happy that I have a few leftover banana cream donuts from Bubba this morning.