Stuff You Should Know: Doughnut or Donut?

There is a famous deleted scene that didn’t make it into Pulp Fiction where Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) interviews Vincent Vega (John Travolta) with a video camera while he waits to take her to dinner at Jack Rabbit Slims. 

Mia says that on important topics there are only two ways a person can answer, and how they answer tells you who they are. “For instance, there are only two kinds of people in the world,” she says, “Beatles people and Elvis people. Now Beatles people can like Elvis, and Elvis people can like the Beatles, but nobody likes them both equally. Somewhere, you have to make a choice, and that choice tells you who you are.”¹

What Mia is saying—or rather, what Quentin Tarantino is saying through her—is that for all the shades of gray in the world, when it comes right down to it, the important stuff is black and white. You see it in politics—Left vs. Right—you see it in music—Beatles vs. Elvis—you see it in religion—Catholic vs. Protestant, Shiite vs. Sunni—and you see it in . . . doughnuts?! Or is it donuts? 

From the spelling, to how they’re made, to the variety of flavors, to the best brand, do(ugh)nuts are a study in duality.

See there, it starts right out of the gate with this, what is perhaps the greatest tasty sweet treat. From the spelling, to how they’re made, to the variety of flavors, to the best brand, do(ugh)nuts ² are a study in duality.

DOUGHNUT VERSUS DONUT

Dough has been fried in oil and sprinkled with sweet, sugary goodness by countless cultures since at least the time of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome,³ if not even earlier with prehistoric Native American societies.⁴ But the first appearance of the term “doughnut” doesn’t occur until the turn of the nineteenth century—and it appears as doughnut, not donut—in the appendix of an 1803 English cookbook that featured American recipes. It then appears in a satirical novel by Washington Irving in 1809, called A History of New York, in which his description of early life under Dutch control includes the description of “balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, called doughnuts or...

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