The history of donuts

One day in July last year, at the National Museum of American History, an upright piano stood on the stage. On a wooden tray next to it, there is a strange metal device about five feet high. Huan Wang Xiao, once the most advanced manufacturer of automatic donuts in the United States, has just been donated to the Smithsonian Institution by Crisby Cramer Donuts Company. It's Christy Clem's 6th birthday. I remember how the doughnut-loving policeman became a stereotype in my sixth or seventh year when I stopped at the green, red and white Crisby Cramer Square in Alexandria, Virginia. There is a large glass window behind the counter, where you can see the glittering conveyor belts and shelves filled with fresh glazed doughnuts, and you can also feel half dizzy about the richness of these sweet vanilla flavors. At the ceremony of the Smithsonian Institution, the King of Rings was hailed as a milestone in the history of doughnuts in the United States. Then, a singer named Cindy hutchins walked up to Mike, drew pictures in the museum's popular single file (there are more than 1 million songs in total) and sang, "Who made a doughnut with a hole in the middle?" How it is done is always a mystery.

well, yes, it isn't. In fact, the humble doughnut does have a complicated past, involving Dutch immigrants, Russian exiles, French bakers, Irving Berlin, Clark Gable and a certain number of Native Americans. And, yes, in its democratic spirit, optimism and various origins, it does seem quite typical of the United States.

of course, doughnuts in some form or other have existed for a long time, so that archaeologists have been finding some fossils that look like doughnuts in the middle of prehistoric Native American settlements. But the real donuts (if the word is correct) should have come to Manhattan (then New Amsterdam) under the annoying Dutch name olykoeks "greasy cake".

It soon spread to the middle of 19th century. Elizabeth Gregory, the mother of a New England captain, made an evil fried dough, skillfully using her son's nutmeg, cinnamon and lemon peel as spices. Some people say that she did this so that her son Hansen and his crew could store a cake during a long trip, a cake that could help ward off scurvy and colds. Anyway, Mrs. Gregory put hazelnuts or walnuts in the middle, because the dough there may be undercooked and called doughnuts in a straightforward way.

Her son always claims that the credit is lower than this: putting the hole in the doughnut. Some cynical doughnut historians insist that Captain Gregory did it to save ingredients, while others think that the hole may make the whole process easier to digest. Others said that he gave the doughnut its shape, and when he needed to keep his hands on the wheel during the storm, he tilted one of his mother's doughnuts on the spokes of his boat wheel. In an interview with the Boston Post at the turn of the century, Captain Gregory tried to quell the rumor with his memories of 5 years ago: he said that with the top of a round tin pepper box, he cut "the first doughnut hole seen by the human eye" in the middle of a doughnut.

one likes to think that the less the better. But in fact, it was not until the First World War that millions of homesick American doughnuts met millions of doughnuts in the trenches of France that doughnuts entered their own world. They are served by female volunteers, and they even take them to the front, giving soldiers a sense of home. When the donuts came back from the war, they naturally liked to eat more donuts. (However, the name "doughnut" is not derived from doughnuts. It can be traced back to the Civil War when doughnuts were relatively absent, when cavalry mocked infantry as doughnuts, perhaps because their spherical brass buttons were like flour jiaozi, or because soldiers polished their white belts with flour.

The first donut machine didn't appear in new york until 192, when enterprising refugees from tsarist Russia began to sell fried donuts from his bakery. Not surprisingly, hungry theater audiences forced him to make a gadget. Vernon Rudolph returned from military service and wanted to expand his doughnut chain. At that time, that is, in the early 195s, the first ring king began to mass-produce backstage.

By the end of 195s, in 29 Krispy Kreme stores and factories in 12 states, the ring king like the Smithsonian model produced 75 dozen doughnuts per hour. They face severe punishment. Duncan donuts, which started in Quincy, Massachusetts in 195, have been flourishing ever since. By the early 198 s, the little ring king was out of date; For donut lovers, this is a good memory, replaced by newer and more sophisticated equipment. Sadly, for a while, donuts themselves seemed to be in decline, especially in new york, where they were being challenged by more elegant bagels. But my friends and I, college students in a small town in North Carolina who didn't have doughnuts, had no idea of the 2-mile trip to Charlotte at 1 am: steaming coffee on the counter, the usual night owl customers, and fresh Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

These days, the double donuts made by Krispy Kreme and others ride very high. Krispy Kreme, the most famous store in the south for a long time, is expanding to the north and west, and its sales increased by 2% in 1997. Last February, The New Yorker described the Manhattan store as a "holy land" and introduced the process of making doughnuts in detail again. (This new machine produces 8 dozen doughnuts per hour-more than 1 times that of "Little Lord of the Rings"-but it still uses the secret recipe and doughnut mixture from Winston Salem. Duncan Donuts has twice as many stores in the United States and 37 other countries as Krispy Kreme, and nearly five times as many sales worldwide. In the United States alone, about 1 billion doughnuts are made every year, while Krispy Kreme only makes 1.1 billion doughnuts. No wonder someone saw the reprint of Homer Price, a famous children's book by Robert McCloskey. One of the main characters in the book is a doughnut-making machine running wildly.

The consumption figures of doughnuts do not encourage nutritionists, who like to point out that the average doughnut can withstand the impact of 3 calories, and is mainly famous for sugar and fat. In fact, the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine lamented the unsaturated fat emitted by glazed donuts. Famous chefs generally regret doughnuts. But neither contempt for science nor cooking nor outright scolding can stop believers. He used "angel" or even "sugar-coated air" to describe Crisby Clem's hot "original glazed" doughnuts.

David Sajt is one of the collection managers in charge of the Smithsonian's acquisition of important cultural relics from American technology and culture for the future, so that the future will have a permanent record. For him and his colleagues, although the old ring king Jr. has been retired for storage, its significance is the same as that of cast iron cookware in colonial times, but it is more complicated. Shayt is glad that the organization has also stored four empty paper bags, each with the appropriate ingredients of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. "After 8 years, if America loses the art of making doughnuts," he said, "we can help rebuild how to do it." Maybe so. But so far, no one knows Joe Loeb's secret recipe except Crispy Cramer. Lock it in Winston Salem's safe.