10th - 18th MAY 2025
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Christopher Freeman of Dunns Bakery set up the charity week in 1992 after watching the harrowing report on the Ethiopian famine by Michael Buerk and wanted to use his craft and industry to also help children in need.
Dunns Bakery is a renowned bakery in the heart of Crouch End, now ran by his son Lewis Freeman. Since then he has gone to raise vital funds for two charities, with the most recent The Children’s Trust, the UK’s leading charity for children with brain injury receiving over half a million pounds and counting.
Click on a year below and discover more about National Doughnut Week’s history…
It’s claimed that an early version of a deep fried doughnut originated in Ancient Rome when people started frying dough and putting sugar or cinnamon on it.
The cookbook Küchenmeisterei (Mastery of the Kitchen), published in Nuremberg in 1485, offers a recipe for “Gefüllte Krapfen”, sugar free, stuffed, fried dough cakes.
Dutch settlers brought olykoek (“oil(y) cake”) to New York or what known at the time as New Amsterdam in the early 18th century. These looked like current ones but no ring.
The most interesting UK related fact is that a recipe for fried dough “nuts” was published, in 1750 England, under the title “How to make Hertfordshire Cakes, Nuts and Pincushions”, in The Country Housewife’s Family Companion by William Ellis – so they can be claimed to have originated here in the UK.1
A recipe labelled “dow nuts”, again from Hertfordshire was also found in a book of recipes and domestic tips written around 1800, by the wife of Baron Thomas Dimsdale, the recipe being given to the dowager Baroness by an acquaintance who transcribed for her the cooking instructions for a “dow nut”.
The first cookbook using the near conventional “dough nuts” spelling was possibly the 1803 edition of “The Frugal Housewife: Or, Complete Woman Cook”, which included dough nuts in an appendix of American recipes.
The most popular and stated fact is that one of the earliest mentions of “dough-nut” was in Washington Irving‘s 1809 book A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty: “Balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, and called dough-nuts, or olykoeks.”2
However Hanson Gregory, an American, claimed to have invented the ring-shaped doughnut in 1847 aboard a lime-trading ship when he was 16 years old. Gregory was dissatisfied with the greasiness of doughnuts twisted into various shapes and with the raw centre of regular doughnuts. He claimed to have punched a hole in the centre of dough with the ship’s tin pepper box, and to have later taught the technique to his mother. Smithsonian Magazine states that his mother, Elizabeth Gregory, “made a wicked deep-fried dough that cleverly used her son’s spice cargo of nutmeg and cinnamon, along with lemon rind,” and “put hazelnuts or walnuts in the centre, where the dough might not cook through”, and called the food ‘doughnuts’.3
