Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren vogelbaumb Here. Donuts aren't just the best way to
Speaker 1: get on the good side of your friends or coworkers
Speaker 1: or mechanic or pretty much anyone else. These snacks also
Speaker 1: have a storied past that goes back thousands of years
Speaker 1: to get to the tasty toroid we know today. There are,
Speaker 1: of course, two main categories of donuts, yeast raised and
Speaker 1: cake donuts. Yeast raised are the fluffy airy types that
Speaker 1: get that fluffiness from yes yeast and are sometimes filled
Speaker 1: with jelly cream or other stuff. Cake types are denser
Speaker 1: and get their tender texture from being raised with chemical
Speaker 1: leveners like baking powder. Both are fried in oil because
Speaker 1: that's a great way to make things delicious. We didn't
Speaker 1: really figure out chemical leveners until the eighteen hundreds, but
Speaker 1: phrased breads go back five thousand years or more. People
Speaker 1: in various parts of the world developed them in tandem
Speaker 1: with beer brewing. The same types of yeast make both
Speaker 1: beer and bread bubbly, and some of those early breads
Speaker 1: were sweetened, and sometimes the dough was fried in oil
Speaker 1: instead of being baked, so by the end of the
Speaker 1: Middle Ages around the fifteen hundreds, cultures certainly throughout Europe
Speaker 1: had rich traditions of frying balls or rings of sweet
Speaker 1: dough in oil or lard. Because both sweeteners and fats
Speaker 1: were expensive at the time, these were often treats reserved
Speaker 1: for holidays like Christmas, Hanukkah or Carnival. Dutch colonists brought
Speaker 1: the tradition with them to North America in the sixteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: Their term for them was oily cook, meaning literally oily cake.
Speaker 1: We might have gotten the word doughnut from England in
Speaker 1: the mid seventeen hundreds, recipes appearing for nuts a fried
Speaker 1: dough meaning small lumps, and a food historian recently found
Speaker 1: a book of recipes and household management tips written in
Speaker 1: eighteen hundred by a baroness in Hertfordshire, England, which included
Speaker 1: a recipe for a dough nut, which called for a
Speaker 1: yeast raised mixture of flour, sugar, butter, eggs, and nutmeg
Speaker 1: to be fried in pork lard. Interestingly, there was also
Speaker 1: a Polish Yiddish word for similar treats doughnuts, though those
Speaker 1: were fried in oil or schmaltz. In the mid eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: a woman from Maine by the name of Elizabeth Gregory
Speaker 1: deep fried some dough for her son Hanson, who was
Speaker 1: a sea captain, to take on his voyages. She put
Speaker 1: nuts in the center of the pastry and created a
Speaker 1: literal doughnut. A probably apocryphal story says the captain Gregory
Speaker 1: made the first doughnut hole when he spiked one of
Speaker 1: his mother's fried pastries on a spoke of his ship's wheel,
Speaker 1: allowing him to keep his hands free to steer. But really,
Speaker 1: making donuts ring shaped just makes sense. Deep frying is
Speaker 1: a hot and quick process. If you fry a solid
Speaker 1: circle of dough, it's likely to burn on the edges
Speaker 1: before the center cooks through. Adding a hole gives you
Speaker 1: more surface area, thus letting the resulting ring cook through
Speaker 1: at an even rate. By the way, the donut holes
Speaker 1: that you can buy today are made separately, as doughnut
Speaker 1: machinery creates rings, not solid circles that need to have
Speaker 1: a hole punched out. Those ring machines have been in
Speaker 1: use since the nineteen twenties. During World War One, Salvation
Speaker 1: Army volunteers nicknamed doughnut lassies, fried and served donuts to
Speaker 1: American soldiers in France. This cemented the snack's image is
Speaker 1: a wholesome slice of home. But the dough boy, nicknamed
Speaker 1: for World War One soldiers, had nothing to do with donuts.
Speaker 1: It might have come from the early Mexican War of
Speaker 1: eighteen forty six to eighteen forty eight, when American soldiers
Speaker 1: were covered in dust on their track, giving the appearance
Speaker 1: that they were covered in flour. In the early nineteen forties,
Speaker 1: the Donut Corporation of America, the biggest donut maker of
Speaker 1: the time, A, tried pushing a product called vitamin donuts, Yes,
Speaker 1: vitamin donuts A. Marketing food products as enriched with synthesized
Speaker 1: vitamins was and still is a popular trend, and the
Speaker 1: company tried jumping on the bandwagon. They hit a legal
Speaker 1: snag as the donuts themselves weren't vitamin enriched, just the
Speaker 1: flour that they were made with, so they had to
Speaker 1: switch to marketing their product as just donuts. During World
Speaker 1: War Two, volunteers from the Red Cross, this time again
Speaker 1: served donuts to soldiers at war. It created enough nostalgia
Speaker 1: that many a returning veteran opened up a donut shop
Speaker 1: and that perhaps is how cops began hanging out in
Speaker 1: donut shops. In the nineteen fifties, more police officers began
Speaker 1: patrolling in cars, and they needed somewhere to park and
Speaker 1: do paperwork during their night beats. Donut shops had started
Speaker 1: to proliferate at the same time and were often open
Speaker 1: at three or four am to make fresh pastries and
Speaker 1: coffee for the day. The shops provided a place to
Speaker 1: stop and get a snack. Furthermore, the shop owners liked
Speaker 1: having cops around for protection. In the book Donut History,
Speaker 1: Recipes and Lore from Boston to Berlin, the former mayor
Speaker 1: and police chief of Philadelphia, Frank Rizzo, is quoted as saying,
Speaker 1: when I was a cop, even though I had breakfast
Speaker 1: at home, there was nothing I liked better than a big,
Speaker 1: thick donut and a cup of coffee. You got out there,
Speaker 1: walked around, rolled in the streets at the criminals, and
Speaker 1: burned the calories off. These days, about ten billion donuts
Speaker 1: are made every year in the United States alone, and
Speaker 1: if you're mathematically minded, you can calculate the volume of
Speaker 1: any or all of them, as long as you get
Speaker 1: a few base measurements. A few years back, a mathematician
Speaker 1: by the name of Eugenia Chang published an eighteen page
Speaker 1: note explaining the equations necessary to figure out how much
Speaker 1: dough goes into a donut, how much sugar you'd need
Speaker 1: to code it, and even the ratio of squidgy interior
Speaker 1: to crispy exterior on any given pastry. To close us
Speaker 1: out today, here's a quote from her conclusions, which I
Speaker 1: think is pretty solid. If you are me, then it's
Speaker 1: easy to get carried away messing around with calculus. Go
Speaker 1: ahead and eat your donuts however you like them. Today's
Speaker 1: episode is based on the article five Things you Didn't
Speaker 1: Know about donuts on how Stuffworks dot com, written by
Speaker 1: Katherine Whitburn. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership
Speaker 1: with how Stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler
Speaker 1: Klang and Ramsey Young. Four more podcasts my heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
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