Free How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun by Josh Chetwynd Page B

polymers like styrene-butadiene rubber, which is also in—you guessed it—car tires.
     
     
    Doughnuts: Seafaring captain
    It should come as no surprise that more than one person has taken credit for the design of the modern doughnut. After all, who wouldn’t want to be responsible for such a satisfying treat? To quote the always sage Homer Simpson (who does not stake a claim): “Doughnuts. Is there anything they can’t do?”
      
    These fried cakes were first produced in sixteenth-century Holland and were called olykoek (translation: “oil cake”). They were made of sweetened dough and sometimes sugared. Early American connoisseurs of olykoek included Dutch settlers in New York and, despite their austere lifestyle, the Pilgrims in New England. They called the treats “dough nuts” because they were originally small—some were even walnut-size.
    The big breakthrough came with the invention of the hole in the middle. The problem with the old school version of the pastry was that it would not fry uniformly and, inevitably, the center of the treat would become soggy with excess oil. With a hole in the center, surface area increased and the doughnut became all the more perfect.
    So who was the genius who invented nothing? This important question was one that required serious debate. In 1941 the Doughnut Corporation of America set up a confab at the swanky Astor Hotel in New York City to address this very issue. The company convened a three-person panel of celebrity judges: quiz show host Clifton Fadiman, journalist Franklin Adams, and gossip columnist/professional hostess Elsa Maxwell. Their job was to determine the following, “Who put the hole in the doughnut?”
    While at least one food historian gives the honor to the Pennsylvania Dutch (they wanted to make dunking their doughnuts in coffee easier), the two contenders for the crown at this debate relied on either a fortuitous accident or some improvised inspiration.
    The first contestant was an unnamed Native American from Cape Cod. Henry A. Ellis, a lawyer from the Cape, is generally credited as the man making the argument on behalf of the anonymous member of the Nauset tribe. Ellis claimed that the brave in question shot an arrow straight through the middle of a Pilgrim’s fry cake creating the first holed doughnut. Despite his courtroom background, Ellis’s argument wasn’t much of one. He lacked any tangible evidence to back up his story.
    His opponent, Fred Crockett, was better prepared. Crockett entered the fray on behalf of his cousin Hanson Crockett Gregory, bearing letters and affidavits to support his case. Crockett said that in 1847, a teenage Gregory, who would go on to become a renowned ship captain in Maine, heard his mom complaining that the centers of her doughnuts were getting too soggy. The brash young man got up, walked across the room, and stuck his fork through the center of one of the cakes—problem solved.
    Crockett won the day with that simple explanation. It was enough for the town of Camden, Maine, to erect a plaque in Gregory’s honor in 1947 calling him “The Inventor of the Hole in the Doughnut.” Despite Crockett’s victorious account, others have told Gregory’s story differently. The most fanciful version features sea captain Gregory fighting a terrible storm and needing somewhere to put his doughnut. With little choice, he stuck it on a spoke of his ship’s wheel, creating the hole. In her comprehensive volume, The Donut Book: The Whole Story in Words, Pictures & Outrageous Tales , Sally Levitt Steinberg persuasively argues that the popular ship’s wheel anecdote came from a children’s book fictionalizing Gregory’s discovery called Cap’n Dow and the Hole in the Doughnut .
    As for Gregory himself, he also weighed in on the topic. During an interview at the dawn of the twentieth century, Gregory told a reporter for the Boston Post he’d grown sick of eating tough doughnuts known as “greasy sinkers.” Considering