US National Donut/Doughnut Day
<p>In the autumn of 1917, two Salvation Army officers stationed near the front line in Montiers-sur-Saulx, France, found themselves with limited supplies and homesick American soldiers. Ensign Margaret Sheldon and Adjutant Helen Purviance decided that what the men needed was something that tasted of home, and with the flour, sugar, lard, and a single rolling pin they had to hand, they began frying doughnuts, reportedly seven at a time in a small pan, and on at least one occasion shaping them over the only round mould available: a soldier’s steel helmet. That first day they turned out roughly 150. The image stuck, and it is the reason US National Donut Day falls on the first Friday in June.</p>
<h2 id="from-a-field-kitchen-to-a-national-observance">From a field kitchen to a national observance</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>The doughnut effort grew quickly. Within weeks the women, soon joined by others and collectively nicknamed the “Doughnut Lassies” or “Doughnut Girls,” were producing thousands of doughnuts a day, by some Salvation Army accounts as many as 9,000, working close enough to the fighting that they shared the soldiers’ danger. When the war ended and the American troops, the “doughboys,” came home, they carried with them an affection for the doughnut that helped turn it from a regional fried cake into a national staple.</p>
<p>Two decades later, in 1938, the Salvation Army in Chicago created National Donut Day for a double purpose: to raise funds during the depths of the Great Depression and to honour the women who had served in France. The first Friday in June was chosen, and the observance has run continuously since, making it one of the oldest food holidays in the United States with a genuinely documented founding.</p>
<p>The volunteers themselves were part of a larger Salvation Army deployment. The organisation sent around 250 workers to France during the war, many of them women who ran “huts” near the front offering coffee, baked goods, mending, and a sympathetic ear. The doughnut became their signature almost by accident, chosen because it could be made from staples and fried quickly in cramped conditions, but it proved the perfect emblem: cheap, portable, and powerfully evocative of home. When General John J. Pershing’s American Expeditionary Forces returned, the doughnut returned with them as a fixed association with the comforts of the Salvation Army hut, and the term “doughboy,” already in use for American infantry, deepened the bond in the public imagination.</p>
<h2 id="the-longer-history-of-the-doughnut">The longer history of the doughnut</h2>
<p>The doughnut the Lassies fried already had a long American lineage. Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam brought <em>olykoeck</em>, literally “oil cake,” balls of sweetened dough fried in hog’s fat. Washington Irving described exactly these in his 1809 <em>History of New York</em>, calling them “balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, and called dough-nuts, or olykoeks.” The familiar ring shape, with its hole, is popularly credited to a nineteenth-century New England sea captain, Hanson Gregory, who is said to have punched out the soggy, undercooked centre, though that story is more legend than verified record.</p>
<p>What is documented is the doughnut’s industrialisation. In 1920 a Russian-born refugee, Adolph Levitt, built the first automatic doughnut machine in New York City to keep up with theatre crowds, and the spectacle of doughnuts rolling off a machine in a shop window helped fix the treat in American popular culture well before the Salvation Army gave it a day.</p>
<h2 id="why-the-day-carries-weight">Why the day carries weight</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>National Donut Day endures because it is not really about the pastry. It commemorates a particular kind of courage, women who chose to stand in a war zone offering comfort rather than weapons, and it does so through an object cheap and cheerful enough that anyone can take part. The annual Salvation Army fundraising that still attaches to the day keeps the original 1938 purpose alive, channelling a small indulgence toward charitable work.</p>
<p>It also belongs to a broader American habit of building celebration around an everyday food, a habit that turns the ordinary into something worth marking. The same impulse gives the calendar days for everything from <a href="/specialdate/national-ice-cream-day/">National Ice Cream Day</a> to the comparatively refined <a href="/specialdate/extra-virgin-olive-oil-day/">Extra Virgin Olive Oil Day</a>; the doughnut’s day simply happens to carry an unusually moving story underneath the sugar.</p>
<h2 id="how-it-is-celebrated">How it is celebrated</h2>
<p>On the first Friday in June, doughnut chains and independent bakeries across the United States hand out free or discounted doughnuts, frequently in exchange for a donation. Major chains such as Dunkin’ and Krispy Kreme have made giveaways an annual fixture, and Salvation Army branches run fundraising events that explicitly tie the treat back to the Lassies. For most participants it is a free-doughnut day first and a history lesson second, but the two coexist comfortably.</p>
<p>It is worth noting that the United States confusingly has a second doughnut day in November, marked on the fifth. That later date grew out of mid-twentieth-century food culture and social media rather than the Salvation Army, and is celebrated as the more historically grounded sibling of the <a href="/specialdate/us-national-doughnut-day/">November National Doughnut Day</a>. The June observance is the original.</p>
<h2 id="a-family-of-fried-dough">A family of fried dough</h2>
<p>The doughnut sits within a global clan of fried, sweetened dough. The two American families are the yeast-raised doughnut, airy from a long proof, and the cake doughnut, denser and leavened chemically. Beyond them lie the German <em>Berliner</em>, a jam-filled bun with no hole; the Italian <em>bombolone</em>; the Polish <em>pączki</em>, eaten in vast numbers before Lent; and the Spanish and Latin American <em>churro</em>, piped and ridged. Each grew from the same simple discovery, that dough dropped into hot fat becomes something tender and irresistible, and each carries its own customs, often tied to carnival or feast days.</p>
<p>Within the United States itself the doughnut splintered into regional dialects. New Orleans claims the <em>beignet</em>, a square of choux-style dough fried and buried under icing sugar, brought by French and Acadian settlers and immortalised at the Café du Monde. Pennsylvania’s Dutch country eats <em>fastnachts</em>, dense potato-dough squares fried on Shrove Tuesday to use up fat before Lent. The Polish communities of Chicago and Detroit turn Fat Tuesday into Pączki Day, when bakeries sell the rich, filled buns by the hundred thousand. Each of these traditions predates or runs parallel to the Salvation Army’s holiday, a reminder that the doughnut was woven into American immigrant life long before it acquired a national day of its own.</p>
<h2 id="from-field-kitchen-to-global-chain">From field kitchen to global chain</h2>
<p>The doughnut the Lassies fried by hand has, in the decades since, become one of the most industrialised foods on earth, and the contrast sharpens the holiday’s meaning. Krispy Kreme, founded by Vernon Rudolph in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on 13 July 1937, built an empire on a single glazed yeast ring delivered hot from the line, its “Hot Now” sign a Pavlovian summons. Dunkin’, founded in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1948, made the doughnut a companion to commuter coffee. Between them and the countless independent shops, Americans now eat doughnuts by the billions each year.</p>
<p>That scale is precisely why the June observance retains its force. A holiday born to honour improvised generosity in a war zone now sits inside an industry of vast, mechanised plenty, and the annual reminder of where the celebration came from keeps a thread of meaning attached to what might otherwise be pure commerce. When a chain hands out a free doughnut on the first Friday in June, it is, knowingly or not, re-enacting in miniature the gesture of two women in a French field kitchen in 1917.</p>
<h2 id="symbols-and-what-they-stand-for">Symbols and what they stand for</h2>
<p>The ring of fried dough is the obvious emblem, but the deeper symbol of the day is the helmet, that improvised mould in the trenches of 1917. It captures the whole spirit of the observance: comfort improvised under terrible conditions, generosity offered freely with whatever was at hand. The pairing of doughnuts with charitable giving each June is a direct continuation of that gesture rather than a marketing overlay.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>The first front-line doughnuts in 1917 were reportedly fried seven at a time, and on occasion shaped over a soldier’s steel helmet for want of a proper cutter.</li>
<li>Margaret Sheldon and Helen Purviance, the original Doughnut Lassies, are credited with starting the effort that grew to thousands of doughnuts a day near the French front.</li>
<li>Washington Irving used the word “dough-nuts” in print in 1809, more than a century before the Salvation Army created the holiday.</li>
<li>The first automatic doughnut machine was built in New York in 1920 by Adolph Levitt, a refugee who had fled persecution in Tsarist Russia.</li>
<li>The United States has two separate doughnut days, the original Salvation Army one on the first Friday of June and a later, unrelated one on 5th November.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>It is a strange and rather humane thing that one of America’s favourite excuses to eat sugar began as an act of mercy in a war zone. The Doughnut Lassies could not stop the fighting or shorten the war, but they could make something warm appear where there had been only mud and fear, and they understood how much that mattered. The doughnut’s day asks very little of anyone, a dollar, a queue, a few minutes. What it quietly preserves is the memory that comfort, freely given, is its own kind of bravery.</p>
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