By Cara Beth Lewis
Doughnuts are a delicious pastry that come in many forms – with a hole, without a hole, hole-only, filled, frosted, and wherever else your imagination takes you. With doughnuts, the possibilities are almost endless.
Doughnuts are a popular sweet treat in America. Each year, over ten billion doughnuts are made in the US.
Check out these interesting facts from Food Network:
1: Doughnuts — loosely defined — are believed to have existed way back to prehistoric times, but doughnuts more or less as we know them today are said to have been brought to what would become Manhattan when it was still New Amsterdam. They were not terribly appealingly known as olykoeks — “oily cakes.”
2: Many accounts credit Elizabeth Gregory, the mother of a mid-19th-century New England ship captain, with creating the first doughnut with a hole in the middle — and for giving the doughnut its name. According to one account, Gregory put hazelnuts or walnuts in the center of deep-fried dough to fill in where the dough was unlikely to cook through. Another version claims Gregory’s son, the captain, created the hole by spiking a doughnut on the ship wheel when he needed both hands to steer during a storm.
3: Doughnuts hit the popularity big-time during WWI, when volunteers served them to United States soldiers while they were fighting on the front lines and then, subsequently, returned home with a taste for them.
4: A Russian immigrant named Adolph Levitt invented the first doughnut machine in 1920, using it to make the doughnuts at his bakery in New York City.
5: Automatically produced doughnuts were highly popular at the 1934 World’s Fair, in Chicago. A poster touted them as “the food hit of the Century of Progress.”
6: The Entenmann’s brothers, William, Robert and Charles, and mother, Martha, invented the familiar “see-through” cake box for baked goods in 1959. They believed people were more inclined to buy what they could see.
7: In 1996, the New York Times declared that “no profession is as closely identified with a food as police work is with doughnuts” and posited that, because so many police officers hang out in doughnut shops, they “have one of the lowest rates of robbery of any type of retail business.”
8: Today, Entenmann’s doughnut bakery in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, is the largest doughnut bakery in the United States.
9: Entenmann’s — which churns out 100,000 doughnuts every hour, 15 million every week, 780 million every year — has made more than 4 billion doughnuts. That’s enough to circle Earth nearly nine times, if you laid them end to end.
10: At the Grand Canyon’s narrowest point — about 4 miles wide — you would need to put 253,440 doughnuts on a string to reach the other side.
11: It would take 3,660 doughnuts to reach the top of the Statue of Liberty.
12: More than 55 million donuts would be needed to reach across the U.S. from Long Beach, California, to Long Island, New York.
In Bladen County, a local bakery serves delicious doughnuts daily. This bakery is Burney’s Sweets and More in Elizabethtown.
Burney’s offers several different doughnut varieties: doughnut holes, glazed, filled, chocolate-topped, zebra-topped, sprinkled, red velvet cake doughnut, sour cream cake doughnut, pumpkin spice cake doughnut, and chocolate cake doughnut. Yum!
In addition to doughnuts, they offer croissants, cakes, pies, and other sweets! They also serve a lunch special daily.
The bakery in Elizabethtown operates Monday through Friday from 7 am until 5 pm, and Saturday from 7 am until 3 pm. Burney’s Sweets and More also has locations in Charlotte, Clinton, Erwin, Fayetteville, Hampstead, Raleigh, Smithfield, Southport, Wallace, Waxhaw, and Wilmington — However, Elizabethtown is their “founding location.”
In honor of National Doughnut Day, pay a visit to Burney’s Sweets and More!
Burney’s Sweets and More is located at 106-B Martin Luther King Drive in Elizabethtown.
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