Doughnuts, like Ferris wheels and baseball, are a uniquely American invention. Washington Irving, chronicler of the ghostly “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” described the new pastry in his 1809 novel History of New York: “an enormous dish of balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, and called dough-nuts, or oly koeks: a delicious kind of cake, at present known scarce to this city, except in genuine Dutch families.” This was, of course, pre-hole doughnut. That innovation came later, and under murky circumstances. Was it the Pennsylvania Dutch who added the hole for easier dunking? Or the scrappy teenager Hanson Crockett Gregory, who realized that cutting out the middle made for a more fry-able dough? Either way, by the mid-19th century, the doughnut was sporting the iconic hole that would make…
