Hard Telling Not Knowing each week tries to answer your burning questions about why things are the way they are in Maine — specifically about Maine culture and history, both long ago and recent, large and small, important and silly. Send your questions to [email protected].
Apocryphal stories abound in Maine folklore, from the tall tales from lumbermen in the Maine woods to the legend of Jonathan Buck’s grave.
But while those can be scary or supernatural, some are a lot more tame — but no less unprovable. For instance, the story of how the hole in the doughnut was invented by a Mainer.
The story dates back to the 1840s, when Maine was still a young state and its economy was driven almost entirely by farming, logging and shipping. Hanson Gregory, born in Rockport in 1831, started his career as a sailor at age 16, and quickly rose through the ranks to become a sea captain.
His mother, Elizabeth, worried for her son and his shipmates during the long months at sea, and would make big batches of fried dough for him to bring along with him each time he left. She flavored them with the cinnamon, nutmeg and lemon that her son brought back from his travels.
Fried dough treats were known the world over, usually shaped into flattened balls or rolled into sticks. A direct precursor to the modern doughnut is the “oly koek,” a fried Dutch treat that was popular in the 18th and early 19th century among the descendants of Dutch colonists in New York; in English it means “oily cake.” The word doughnut itself comes from a British cookbook published around 1800, which had a fried dough recipe called a “dow nut.” From there, the name evolved to doughnut.
Anyway, as much as the hungry Gregory loved his dear mother’s cooking, the story goes that he didn’t love the fact that the center of the dough ball was undercooked compared with the rest of the treat. They also held so much grease that, as Gregory told the Washington Post in 1916, it was “tough on the digestion.”
Gregory claims to have put the hole in the doughnut sometime in the late 1840s, to make cooking faster, make all the edges crispier and to lessen the amount of oil the dough sopped up. A 1957 Bangor Daily News story says he simply used a fork. One source says he used the lid of the ship’s pepper tin to cut the hole. Another says he pushed the center of the fried dough onto one of the spokes of the ship’s wheel.
When he returned home to Rockport from another voyage, he suggested to his mother that she try making her fried dough treats into a ring shape, rather than a big doughy blob. The hole-y doughnuts were an instant hit among the townsfolk in Rockport and nearby Rockland and Camden, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Gregory’s birthplace in Rockport, now the parsonage of the Nativity Lutheran Church, bears a plaque noting that he was the “inventor” of the hole in the doughnut.
We’ll never know if this story of how the hole got in the doughnut is really true. Similarly, we’ll probably never know if it’s actually true that a woman from Bangor developed the very first recipe for brownies after a chocolate cake she baked didn’t rise, as some historians and businesses have claimed. That’s a topic for another column.
