• Firecakes Donuts
  • The offerings at Firecakes

Today, the first Friday in June, would probably be one of our most celebrated national holidays if anybody knew about it: it’s National Doughnut Day. Remember that. Program it into your calendar for next year. And then solemnly observe by eating the best doughnut you can find. If you need a holy text, pick up food historian Michael Krondl’s new book, The Donut: History Recipes and Lore from Boston to Berlin.

  • michaelkrondl.net
  • How doughnuts reached the front during World War I

During the 19th century, the doughnut was a homely food, prepared and fried in Americans’ very own kitchens. (Krondl doesn’t mention it, but the Wilder family’s doughnut jar in Farmer Boy is one of my very favorite details in the entire Laura Ingalls Wilder canon.) But during World War I, the doughnut, like its homeland, rose to global prominence when the Salvation Army began mass-producing and serving doughnuts to the doughboys in Europe. In 1918, the Germans actually laid siege to a doughnut truck for several days before, Krondl writes, “the kaiser’s artillery blew the truck to smithereens, sending a rain of crumbs across the western front.”

In the course of his research, Krondl tasted a wide variety of exotic doughnuts, though not Voodoo Donut’s Pepto-Bismol doughnut. (There is a law against putting medicine in food, but Krondl believes it would have run its course anyway: “There’s only so much weirdness people will put up with.”) He also did not try the original cronut, since he believes forcing people to wait in long lines for a limited selection of baked goods is “fundamentally sadistic.” (Hello, Doughnut Vault!) He tried a vegan doughnut made with mushroom extract that tasted fruity, and a pork belly-filled, coconut-topped doughnut sandwich that tasted like southeast Asia (sweet and savory and fat), but his favorite was the creme brulee doughnut at Cartems Donuterie in Vancouver, which, he says, managed to have a burned sugar glaze not only on all outside surfaces, but inside as well.

Krondl himself is spending National Doughnut Day doing more interviews about the book, but he urges everyone to celebrate by getting a good dozen doughnuts from a respectable artisan doughnut place. “Spend the few extra bucks,” he urges. “With the proviso that they’re fresh.”