Poll: What's the best donut shop in Martin, St. Lucie and Indian River counties?
How did doughnuts get their name? Why do they have a hole in the middle? And is it spelled donut or doughnut?
In the mid-19th century, a New England ship captain’s mother named Elizabeth Gregory made a deep-fried dough that used her son’s spice cargo of nutmeg and cinnamon along with lemon rind, according to Smithsonian Magazine. She put hazelnuts or walnuts in the center, where the dough might not cook all the way through, and called them doughnuts.
Her son claimed credit for putting the hole in the doughnut. Historians have a few theories why:
He did it to skimp on ingredients
He thought the hole might make it easier to digest
He skewered a doughnut on a spoke of his ship’s wheel when he had to use both hands during a storm.
In an interview with the Boston Post at the turn of the century, he recalled using the top of a round tin pepper box and cutting into the middle of a doughnut, creating “the first doughnut hole ever seen by mortal eyes.”
Fast forward to 1950, when the new Dunkin' Donuts helped fuel the misspelling of the word. Today, most dictionaries enter "donut" as a variant of "doughnut," and Merriam-Webster notes that "donut has appeared in enough written sources that it has become an accepted spelling."
What's your favorite doughnut shop in Martin, St. Lucie or Indian River County?
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More: Donuts: Here are the 8 best local doughnut shops on the Treasure Coast
This article originally appeared on Treasure Coast Newspapers: Poll: Best donut shop in Sebastian, Stuart, Vero Beach, Fort Pierce, PSL?
