Meet the American who invented the donut

Americans have a “hole” lotta love for the donut.

Credit Maine mariner Captain Hanson Crockett Gregory for that. The then-future high-seas hero, in a moment of deliciously divine inspiration as a teenage galley boy, turned a poorly cooked blob of sailors’ sustenance into the iconic, ring-shaped and deep-fried delicacy we know and love today.

His innovation changed the way people in the U.S., and now much of the world, eat breakfast.

Captain Gregory “was bold and brave and bright,” enthused Texas author Pat Miller, who first heard of the culinary innovator amid a boat tour of Boston Harbor.

Captain Gregory “was bold and brave and bright,” enthused Texas author Pat Miller, who first heard of the culinary innovator amid a boat tour of Boston Harbor.

But Gregory’s long-lasting contribution to American culinary culture has gone largely unrecognized, save for the epithet upon his humble gravestone in a small, isolated sailors’ cemetery in Quincy, Mass., overlooking Boston Harbor, where he lived out his final years.

It reads simply: “Capt. Hanson Gregory. Recognized by the National Bakers Ass’n as the inventor of the doughnut.”

The donut turns 175

Donut lovers celebrate National Donut Day on the first Friday of June — June 3, 2022, this year — in honor of the Salvation Army members who fed the deep-fried rings of fried dough to American soldiers in Europe during World War I.

The culinary world should celebrate another milestone later this month as well. The donut turns 175 years old on June 22.

That was the day, in 1847, that teenage sailor Gregory thought of an innovative solution to a problem plaguing the hungry crew of the sailing ship Ivanhoe.

Dough that was deep-fried in cauldrons of lard had been served to sailors on the seas for centuries. Dutch cooks made a notable version called oily cakes.

“When [the cakes] were fried, they were completely fried through. The idea caught on.”

Washington Irving grew to become America’s first celebrity writer chronicling the life of Dutch settlers in the Hudson River Valley. He’s believed to be the first to use the phrase “dough-nuts” to describe the Dutch treat in his 1809 treatise, “A History of New York.”

They were not the donuts as we know today.

It was “just a big blob of dough,” Miller told Fox News Digital. “The center would remain greasy and partially cooked.”

They were so dense, doughy and uncooked that “sailors called them sinkers,” she said.

Gregory, just 15 at the time, was struck by an idea to lighten the sinker. He took the lid off a water-tight tin can that was used to store pepper in the ship galley.

“He used it like a cookie cutter. He cut out the center of the oily cakes,” she said, while displaying a 19th-century tin spice can, with its sharp-edged lid.