Doughnut | Can’t Sleep? Discover a Hole Lot of History

In 1847, a sixteen-year-old American sailor named Hanson Gregory was fed up with greasy, raw-centered fried dough. Aboard a lime-trading ship, he punched a hole in the center of his dough using the vessel's tin pepper box, creating the ring-shaped donut as we know it—or so he claimed. Whether or not Gregory was the true inventor, his story captures a central puzzle in donut history: why the hole? The answer, as it turns out, is not one story but several, woven through centuries of fried dough traditions across the globe.

The Deep Roots of Fried Dough

Long before the ring donut appeared, humanity was already deep-frying dough. The earliest recorded recipe for a deep-fried dough ball comes from Cato the Elder in ancient Rome, who described globi—balls of cheese, honey, and poppy seeds. By the 13th century, an Arabic cookbook by Ibn Razin al-Tujī featured a recipe for a donut-like sponge made from fried leavened semolina, shaped into small balls. Crucially, this same recipe also mentions shaping a test piece of dough into a ring with a hole to check its proofing before frying the first batch. This suggests that the ring shape, at least as a practical test, predates the donut's modern form.