DONUTS VS. DOUGHNUTS
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here seems to be no consensus about whether to spell the word with or without the ugh. Originally the sweet snack was named a dough nut because that’s what it looked like: a walnut-sized lump of fried dough. Then, in the early eighteen hundreds, this was contracted into doughnut, around the same time as the pastry developed its distinctive ring shape. In transcriptions of colloquial American speech in the post–Civil War era, the word was soon shrunk to donut. After the First World War, this Americanized spelling was popularized in ads by Dono and other early donut companies. Today, the shorter form is preferred three to one (at least according to Google), and who am I to buck the crowd? In the following pages, you’ll notice I stick to donut unless I’m quoting somebody else.
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just that our names are pronounced the same). Like him, I’ve been required to do a little traveling and found it necessary to tabulate the results. I had to visit Seattle, not only to compare and contrast Top Pot’s risen and cake donuts (toothsome and light in the first case and crumbling and tender in the second) but also to check out the warm-fromthe-fryer mini donuts sold at a little stand in the Pike Place Market (a little overhyped I decided after eating a half dozen of the plain and three or four of the bacon-topped variety). Naturally, I had to analyze the qualitative difference between the scrumptious Austrian apricot jam–filled donuts in Vienna and the yeast-raised pillows filled with luscious vanilla cream that you get in Venice (I found the taste differential within the statistical margin of error). My data indicates that the sugar-dusted puffs Parisians call beignets soufflés are measurably lighter than the meltingly soft and cakey red velvet donuts they sell at the Peter Pan bakery in Brooklyn, but 37 percent less fun to dunk. I think that Professor Crandall would be gratified to hear that I have replicated his results, and indeed the more donuts you eat, the more you want. Like him, I feel that in my own small way, I’ve contributed to the stock of human knowledge. And I didn’t even have to sell my soul to the devil (unless there’s something my agent isn’t telling me).
INTRODUCTION
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3/25/14 12:55 PM