And I am Ghee Vada. Nice to Meet You, Mr. Donut.

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An increasing number of people worldwide are ditching “doughnuts” in favor of “donuts”. Even the multinational American fast food company Dunkin Donuts adopted the simplified spelling years ago. Whichever spelling you prefer, the taste remains the same.


The other day, I was invigilating a test. When the last test taker had left, I flipped through a textbook a student had surrendered after a last-minute review and forgotten to claim on leaving the venue. The page I opened to was one that told the story of the doughnut. (I had noticed the textbook earlier on but resisted the temptation to dip into it to satisfy my curiosity. It turned out to have been an exercise in delayed gratification.)

To my surprise, I learned that donuts came to America with Dutch settlers in the 18th century. Those donuts didn’t have a hole in the middle as they do today. The story goes like this.

Elizabeth Gregory, the mother of the captain of a merchant ship, would prepare her olykoeks (oil cakes) according to her special recipe. She made the dough with milk, butter, flour, sugar and eggs, and added walnuts or hazelnuts and various spices that she got from the cargo that the ship was transporting. Elizabeth’s son, Captain Hanson Gregory, used the top of a round tin to cut into the oil cakes and remove the undercooked inner parts as he didn’t like the raw taste.

That was obviously a waste of food, the captain explained in an interview with the Boston Post many years later.  He went on to say that in 1847, to remedy the problem of an undercooked middle section, they began to put a hole in the middle, allowing the inner part to be equally exposed to heat and therefore baked through. That was the birth of modern donut. I think people in India had known this technique long before, as popular ‘urad dal vadas’ date back to Dravidian times. But history belongs to those who are first to write it down, and India was beaten to it.

Did you know that “doughnut hole” refers not only to the actual hole in the middle of a donut, but also to a ball-shaped pastry originally made from the dough cut out to make the holes? It gets even more interesting. In the U.S. Medicare system a “doughnut hole” means a gap in coverage. So the word “hole” as it relates to donuts, actual or metaphorical, is used in the sense of nothing, something, and nothing respectively. Sorry for getting rather philosophical on you, but I’m in good company. Japanese author Haruki Murakami said in his Metaphysics of Food that “Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit”. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

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