US National Doughnut Day
<p>The United States is one of very few countries to celebrate the same food twice in one year, and the doughnut is the reason. The famous doughnut day, the one with the wartime story, falls on the first Friday in June. But there is a second, observed every 5th November, and its origins are murkier, gentler, and in some ways more revealing about how modern food holidays actually come into being. According to the food-holiday historian John-Bryan Hopkins, references to a November doughnut day can be traced in <em>Ladies’ Home Journal</em> as far back as the 1930s, but the date as a fixed annual observance owes far more to twenty-first-century food culture than to any single founder.</p>
<h2 id="two-doughnut-days-and-why-they-differ">Two doughnut days, and why they differ</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>The June celebration was created by the Salvation Army in Chicago in 1938 to honour the “Doughnut Lassies” who fried doughnuts for soldiers in France during the First World War, and it carries an explicit charitable purpose. That history belongs properly to the <a href="/specialdate/us-national-donut-doughnut-day/">June National Doughnut Day</a>, and it is worth reading for the courage behind it.</p>
<p>The 5th November day is the lighter sibling. It has no charity attached, no founding committee, and no single origin story. Hopkins has speculated that its date may have drifted into place because early November sits close to the American Veterans Day on the 11th, making a doughnut tribute feel seasonally appropriate, but this is informed conjecture rather than documented fact. What is clear is that the November date hardened into a recognised observance largely through food blogs, calendars of “national days,” and social media, the modern machinery by which a casual mention becomes an annual fixture.</p>
<h2 id="the-longer-history-both-days-share">The longer history both days share</h2>
<p>Whichever date one keeps, the doughnut behind it has the same deep roots. Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam brought <em>olykoeck</em>, “oil cake,” balls of sweetened dough fried in fat, and Washington Irving described them by name as “dough-nuts” in his 1809 <em>History of New York</em>. The hole that defines the classic ring is popularly attributed to a New England sea captain, Hanson Gregory, who is said to have removed the doughy, undercooked centre, though the tale is more folklore than record.</p>
<p>The doughnut’s twentieth-century rise is better documented. In 1920 Adolph Levitt, a Russian-born immigrant, built the first automatic doughnut machine in New York City, and the sight of doughnuts tumbling off a machine in a shop window turned the treat into a piece of urban spectacle. Levitt’s invention was so commercially successful that his machines were reportedly earning him in the region of 25 million dollars a year by the early 1930s, mostly from wholesale sales to bakeries, and the doughnut was billed at the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair, “A Century of Progress,” as “the food hit of the Century of Progress.” The shorter spelling “donut,” meanwhile, was popularised in the 1920s by the New York-based Display Doughnut Machine Corporation, which trimmed the word to make it easier for foreign buyers of its equipment to pronounce.</p>
<p>The post-war decades cemented the doughnut as American breakfast architecture. Dunkin’ opened in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1948 under the name Open Kettle, renaming itself Dunkin’ Donuts in 1950; Krispy Kreme had begun a little earlier, when Vernon Rudolph opened in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1937 selling his glazed yeast rings, eventually hot off the line beneath a now-famous neon “Hot Now” sign. By the time the November doughnut day solidified, the treat was no longer a novelty but an institution, which is part of why a second celebration could attach itself so painlessly.</p>
<h2 id="why-a-second-lesser-day-still-matters">Why a second, lesser day still matters</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>It would be easy to dismiss the November date as redundant, a marketing echo of the real thing. But the existence of two doughnut days quietly illustrates something true about food culture: celebrations are not always handed down from a single authoritative source. Some accrete, gathering legitimacy through repetition until a casual practice becomes a tradition that few think to question. The 5th November day is a small, living example of that process, a holiday assembled less by decree than by consensus.</p>
<p>Stripped of the wartime narrative, the November observance is also simply about the pleasure of the thing, which links it to the wider family of food celebrations that ask nothing more than that people enjoy an everyday treat properly, from <a href="/specialdate/national-ice-cream-day/">National Ice Cream Day</a> to the more contemplative <a href="/specialdate/extra-virgin-olive-oil-day/">Extra Virgin Olive Oil Day</a>.</p>
<h2 id="how-it-is-celebrated">How it is celebrated</h2>
<p>The 5th November is marked much as its June counterpart is, though usually with less fanfare. Some doughnut chains, including Dunkin’ and Krispy Kreme, have at times run giveaways on both dates, so a free doughnut is not out of the question. Independent bakeries use the day to promote seasonal varieties, autumnal flavours such as pumpkin spice, apple cider, and maple appearing in place of summer’s fruit glazes. Home bakers treat it as a cool-weather baking prompt, the kind of day suited to frying a batch in a warm kitchen.</p>
<p>There is also a happy coincidence of timing that may explain the date’s survival. The 5th November falls just under a week before the American Veterans Day on the 11th, and the food-holiday historian John-Bryan Hopkins has suggested a retailer may have introduced the November date partly to nod, however loosely, at that commemoration, echoing the original day’s wartime roots without the formal charitable structure. Whether or not that connection was ever deliberate, it gives the November observance a faint thematic rhyme with its older sibling: both, in their different registers, sit close to a moment of remembrance, and a doughnut shared in early November can carry a quiet acknowledgement of service even when no one planned it that way.</p>
<h2 id="the-hole-and-the-holes-hole">The hole, and the hole’s hole</h2>
<p>No account of the doughnut is complete without the matter of the hole, which has generated more folklore than perhaps any other feature of a pastry. The most repeated story credits Hanson Gregory, a Maine sea captain, with creating the ring in 1847 at the age of sixteen, supposedly by impaling fried cakes on a spoke of his ship’s wheel, or by punching out the raw centre that had always frustrated cooks. Gregory was a real person, and in a 1916 newspaper interview he did claim the innovation, but the practical truth is more prosaic: a ring of dough has no thick middle to leave gluey and undercooked, and it fries evenly throughout. Whatever the origin, the hole solved a genuine cooking problem.</p>
<p>The hole, in turn, produced its own descendant. The small discs of dough punched from the centre were once discarded or re-fried as scraps, but by the twentieth century they had been rebranded and sold in their own right, “doughnut holes” or, in the Dunkin’ lexicon, “Munchkins,” introduced in 1972. A waste product became a separate menu item, which is a neat illustration of how the doughnut industry has long turned every part of the process into something to sell.</p>
<h2 id="a-worldwide-family-of-fried-dough">A worldwide family of fried dough</h2>
<p>The doughnut belongs to a global clan of fried, sweetened dough, and the November date is as good an occasion as any to notice the relatives. Germany has the <em>Berliner</em>, a jam-filled bun with no hole; Italy the <em>bombolone</em>; Poland the <em>pączki</em>, devoured in their millions before Lent; and Spain and Latin America the ridged <em>churro</em>. Each grew from the same discovery, that dough dropped into hot fat becomes tender and irresistible, and many carry their own seasonal associations, clustering around carnival, Lent, or winter feasts.</p>
<h2 id="symbols-and-spelling">Symbols and spelling</h2>
<p>The ring of dough is the obvious emblem, but the doughnut also carries one of the more entertaining spelling disputes in English. “Doughnut” is the older, traditional form, used by Irving in 1809 and still dominant in print; “donut” is the streamlined commercial child of the 1920s, kept alive by chains such as Dunkin’, which opened in 1950 as the oldest surviving business to use the shorter form. Both are correct, and the coexistence of the two spellings rather suits a treat that comfortably maintains two separate days.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>The United States celebrates two doughnut days a year, the original Salvation Army observance on the first Friday in June and this later, unrelated one on 5th November.</li>
<li>The shorter spelling “donut” was popularised in the 1920s by New York’s Display Doughnut Machine Corporation, which shortened the word so foreign equipment buyers could say it more easily.</li>
<li>Washington Irving used the word “dough-nuts” in print in 1809, calling them “balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat.”</li>
<li>The first automatic doughnut machine was built in New York in 1920 by Adolph Levitt, turning doughnut-making into a shop-window spectacle.</li>
<li>Dunkin’, founded in 1950 (originally as “Open Kettle” in 1948), is the oldest surviving company to use the “donut” spelling.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>There is a quiet honesty in a holiday that admits it is the second of its kind. The 5th November doughnut day carries no grand story, claims no founder, and asks nothing of anyone beyond enjoying a familiar pleasure as the weather turns. Perhaps that is reason enough for it to exist. Not every celebration needs to commemorate sacrifice or mark an anniversary; some simply give a name to the small, recurring delights that make ordinary days a little better. A second doughnut day is not greedy so much as generous, an extra excuse, granted without justification, to do something that makes people happy.</p>
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