The Prehistory of the Donut

The story of donuts not only precedes the tale of the precocious nun but even Christianity itself. In fact it’s likely that fried dough has been around ever since people first learned about the culinary potential of hot grease. A three-thousand-year-old inscription from the time of Pharaoh Ramses III seems to show a couple of cooks deep-frying strips of dough in a pot set over a fire. A millennium later, the Greeks certainly had something I’d call a donut. Athenaeus, the ancient world’s best-known food maven, mentions at least a couple of donut-like treats. In a book called the Deipnosophists (Banquet of the Learned), the Greek author assembles a fictional toga party of learned scholars to chew the fat on everything from the proper way of cooking cuttlefish to the benefits of gay sex. “I am fond of cakes,” the narrator declares before launching into a heavily annotated compendium that goes on for pages. In the midst of this exhaustive tour of cheesecakes, nut confections, and other sweetmeats, our guide points out two sorts of fried cakes. First he singles out something called fried bread, which may or may not be sweet. But then he goes on to describe enkrides. This delicate morsel of fried dough dripping with honey sounds an awful lot like what contemporary Greeks call loukoumades. “[It is] a small pastry deep-fried in olive oil and covered with honey afterward,” our learned donut authority explains, making sure to reference some half dozen literary sources who mention this classical cruller.