My aunt and uncle ran a bakery in the Finger Lakes region, and whenever they would visit, our greedy little hearts leapt with excitement because we knew there would be a bag full of donuts for breakfast – all kinds of donuts: glazed, cinnamon, plain, and sugared. My grandfather, however, did not grow up with “donuts.” He called them “friedcakes,” a once common word from New England into the Great Lakes region. These yeasty, sweetened rings of dough, fried in lard, were part of every farm family’s breakfast.
“Doughnuts” were first reported in the U.S. in 1809 by Washington Irving, who found them in New York’s Dutch families. But why “nut”? Because they didn’t have holes — they were round balls, and “nut” was a common name for a variety of pastry balls at that time. The center of these fried nuts was often too doughy, so in 1847, a young sailor punched a hole out of the center to get it to cook throughout, then told his mother back in Maine about it and the rest is history. Or maybe it’s all legend, but in any case, the ringed doughnut is now as American as apple pie. Speaking of which, a related word is a “fried pie”: a flat pastry folded over a fruit filling and deep-fat fried — in other words, a turnover. This word was once common in New England but now is limited to the South, if it has not disappeared altogether.
In my aunt and uncle’s bag, there were also crullers—now there’s an interesting word. My grandmother from southern New Jersey insisted that all donuts were “crullers,” even those that are ring-shaped, but in the North, they’re usually the oblong ones with a twist. It’s one of those few words that come to us via the old Dutch of New York State (Dutch “krulle” = curled) – not to be confused with the Pennsylvania Dutch who actually are German and use a different word for donut: “fossnock,” which comes from standard German “Fastnacht” (Shrove Tuesday), the day before Lent when fried cakes are made throughout the German-speaking world.
Let’s not forget my favorite in that bakery bag, the jelly donut. Nineteenth-century German immigrants called this a “bismark” in honor of the Iron Chancellor, who may or may not have liked them. It has become a fixture in the Upper Midwest and Canada, but ironically, no one in Germany calls them that. There they are “berliners” or, in the South and Austria, “krapfen.” Over here in the South, bismarks are not round and jelly-filled, but long and tossed with sugar, while in Boston, they are also long, but cream-filled, and covered with chocolate. Then, if you travel to the Upper Mississippi or the Great Plains, Boston’s bismarks have become “long Johns.”
But we’re not done yet! There was also another common word for a donut, a “sinker.” This apparently got its start in New York City in the 1870s, and was originally applied to biscuits that were so heavy they’d sink to the bottom of your belly. As the 20th century got underway, “coffee and sinkers” became a regular feature in diners across the North, but by the 1960s, the term was dying out.
And we’re still not finished! In New England, there was a variation of the donut in which the cook would take some of the sweet dough and throw it into the fat to fry in chunks. This was called a “doughbelly, doughboy” or even “doughgod.” It’s a good bet doughgods came into being after our Puritan ancestors had faded out of the picture because there is the whiff of blasphemy about that name. As unsweetened fried bread, doughgods became a staple around the campfires of the loggers and cowboys out West and there’s a lively discussion online on how to make them.
But what about the spelling? For those who love a good competition, “donut,” born in the late 1930s, recently outpaced “doughnut” in the spelling contest according to Google n-grams — but only in American English. The UK still prefers ‘doughnut’ — but then, they spell “plow” as “plough.”
These days we’ve got so many donut shops, all outdoing themselves to create new products, whether it’s new fillings, new toppings, new shapes — where will it end? As my grandfather might say: make it sweet and it’s all good.
Dale Coye is a member of the American Dialect Society. He has taught English and the humanities at several universities and worked in area theaters as a dialect coach and director. He grew up on a dairy farm in central New York and now lives in Wilton.
Do you have a word that you’d like to know more about? Email news@ledgertranscript.com with WORDS in the subject line and we’ll get your word to Dale.