Hey everybody, welcome back to Explain That Come Five, the podcast where we get the questions you always want to ask and talk about them in a way that's easy to understand. We are your hosts, I'm Tim. And I'm Kevin. So Kevin, today we're talking about a topic that many five-year-olds would consider their favorite, and that is donuts.
Let's start with this question. Why do powdered donuts feel so cold in your mouth? Ah yeah, I love donuts too. Well, for powdered donuts specifically, they feel cool to your tongue, but actually not your fingers.
And it's the powdered sugar that takes down the heat from your tongue as it dissolves into your saliva, thereby making your tongue cooler. You know, your fingers are dry, so no dissolving happens and the heat transfer is minimized. Ah, there's also more surface area, I believe, in powdered sugar versus granulated sugar. Yep, that's right.
A greater surface area means much more area to react to your saliva, and therefore much faster dissolving and faster heat transfer from the tongue to saliva. Why are donuts often associated with the police? Some people observe that all policemen and women seem to love donuts. Is there a reason for this?
Ah, you know, historically, before things like 24-hour convenience stores and the like, donut shops were the first places to open, since they had to get to work before everyone else, so people could get coffee and donuts before work. Now, when police officers were working the night shift from, you know, 10 p.m. to like almost like 4 a.m., nothing else was open. So at 4 a.m., officers would meet up at the first place to open, which was usually the donut shops for some food and drink.
I guess donut stores also provide a place to sit down, take a quick break, or fill out paperwork in a place that's not the front seat of your patrol car. Yeah, for all those practical reasons, too. You know, the police are human, too. Did you know that during the aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, most businesses in the Boston area closed while the manhunt for the suspect was underway, including most restaurants, fast food chains, and coffee shops.
And Dunkin' Donuts kept their stores open in order to serve food and drinks to the police and emergency responders. What a great story. You mentioned the history of donut stores, but where does the concept of the donut itself come from? Ah, yes, fried dough.
So fried dough as a food actually goes back a long way. But donuts as we know them today are relatively young food. Dutch settlers were the ones who brought what in the Dutch is called the oily cake to New York, or rather New Amsterdam, as it was thought of at the time. And these donuts closely resembled what we don't know now, except they did not yet have their current ring shape.
So the North American version seems to have originated after the American Revolution. And one of the earliest mentions of donuts in American writing came from a writer and diplomat named Washington Irving. His is the first official recording of the word donut in the 1809 book called A History of New York, From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty. But also, these donuts did not yet have a hole in the middle like the ones that are popular today.
So in that case, where and when did the hole come into play? That's interesting, because the donut hole is very much in the standard these days, but its origins are actually still completely up for debate. So there are some culinary historians who say the hole was invented because it allowed the donuts to cook faster, which kind of makes sense. The other piece of evidence out there that allows us to trace the approximate time of invention of the hole comes from looking at in-home shopping catalogs, which the 1870s started to have donut cutters shaped in like two concentric circles, one smaller than the other.
Oh, and then there's the history of Hanson Gregory. Oh yes, he's the American kid who claims the hole of the donut as his own invention, right? That's right. Hanson Gregory claimed to have invented the ring-shaped donut in 1847, aboard a lime trading ship when he was just 16 years old.
He apparently was dissatisfied with the greasiness of donuts that were twisted into various shapes and with the raw center of regular donuts. He claimed to have punched a hole in the center of dough with his ship's tin pepper box and have later taught the technique to his mother. They did create a National Donut Day, I think. Oh yes, the National Donut Day is celebrated in the United States of America and it's on the first Friday of June each year, succeeding the Donut Day event created by the Salvation Army in 1938 to honor those of their members who served donuts to soldiers during World War I.
So there are two spellings of donuts, D-O-N-U-T-S, or dough as in D-O-U-G-H-N-U-T-S. Is one British and one American? No, so donut, D-O-U-G-H-N-U-T, is actually the traditional spelling, while donut, D-O-N-U-T, is the simplified version. And the terms are very often used interchangeably.
So here's a donut culture question to end with. In many parts of California, fresh donuts sold by the dozen at local donut stores are typically packaged in these generic pink boxes. Why is this? Oh, so this phenomenon has been attributed to two Cambodian refugees, Teng De Goy and Ning Yen.
They began to transform the local donut shop industry in the mid-1970s. And they proved so adept at the business and in training fellow Chinese Cambodian refugees to follow their model of running successful donut stores that these local donut shops soon dominated. That's cool. But why the pink boxes?
Oh, well, the Goy and Yen, they apparently plan to purchase boxes of a lucky red color rather than the standard white. But the leftover pink stock were cheaper. So being good businessmen, they chose the pink because of its lower cost. And kind of, you know, owing to the success of the Goy and Yen's business, the color soon became a recognizable standard in California.
And of course, this included places like Hollywood. So the pink boxes frequently appeared as film and television props. And this is how it became part of popular culture. I love it.
A truly global delight with Dutch, American, Cambodian, and Chinese influences. What a great way to end. Did you want something new? If you did, send us an email.
We are at eli5thepodcast at gmail.com. We love hearing from you, especially when you've got suggestions for future episodes and topics. As always, thank you to the community at r slash explain like on 5. We will see you all next week.