June 2, 2023 – National Donut Day

Happy National Donut Day! We celebrate National Donut Day on the first Friday in June every year. The first celebration was in Chicago in 1938 as a fundraiser for the Salvation Army. Their goal was to help those in need during the Great Depression and to honor the Salvation Army volunteers who served donuts to soldiers during World War I. Just after the U.S. entered World War I, the Salvation Army sent a fact-finding mission to France and determined the soldier’s needs could be met with social centers they called “huts” that would serve backed goods, provide writing supplies, and even have a clothes-mending service. As you can imagine, producing baked goods near the front lines was no easy task. So two of the volunteers came up with the idea to provide donuts. They were an instant hit and the soldiers started called the women who served them Donut Girls or Donut Lassies. Many countries have their own version of doughnuts, but Dutch immigrants are widely credited with bringing the fried pastry to America before the Revolutionary War. They were originally called olykoeks, which means “oily cakes” and were made by frying lumps of dough in pork fat. Hanson Gregory, a New England ship captain claimed to have invented the ring shaped doughnut in 1847. He wasn’t happy with the greasiness of doughnuts or with the raw centers they often had. So he claimed to have punched a hole in the middle using a tin pepper box. He then taught the technique to his mother, who  would make fried dough pastries for her son and his crew to take on their voyages. The largest concentration of doughnut shops per capita is in Canada, and Canadians eat more doughnuts per capita than any other country. The largest doughnut factory in the U.S. is the Entenmann’s factory in Pennsylvania, which makes 100,000 doughnuts every hour! Learn more here.