No more indigestion-no more greasy sinkers-but just well-done, fried-through doughnuts.” …Well, sir, them doughnuts was the finest I ever tasted. I took the cover off the ship’s tin pepper box, and-I cut into the middle of that doughnut the first hole ever seen by mortal eyes! Well, I says to myself, ‘Why wouldn’t a space inside solve the difficulty?’ I thought at first I’d take one of the strips and roll it around, then I got an inspiration, a great inspiration. And the twisters used to sop up all the grease just where they bent, and they were tough on the digestion. Well, sir, they used to fry all right around the edges, but when you had the edges done the insides was all raw dough. I don’t think we called them doughnuts then-they was just ‘fried cakes’ and ‘twisters.’ Now in them days we used to cut the doughnuts into diamond shapes, and also into long strips, bent in half, and then twisted.

There are a variety of versions of this tale, but the version he himself put forth in the Washington Post (Mar.

This is the birthplace of Captain Hanson Gregory, who first invented the hole in the doughnut in 1847. There is even a plaque in Rockport, Maine near Clam Cove that states “In commemoration. There are some outlandish tales from a sailor, Captain Hanson Gregory, who claimed to have invented the holed doughnut in 1847 at the age of 16. Because bakers make them that way… 😉 In truth, nobody knows for sure why people started putting holes in the fried cakes.

Space age donuts