a donutCider donut
also: apple cider doughnut
Bought hot at the mill, in a paper bag that goes translucent on the drive home.
An American cake donut flavoured with apple cider, cinnamon and nutmeg in the batter, usually rolled in cinnamon or granulated sugar. Denser and moister than a plain cake ring because the cider is in the batter, not on it.
The story Cited · wp-cider-doughnut
Cider donuts go back at least to the late nineteenth century — a 1901 piece in The Buffalo Enquirer has them at Halloween parties. Donuts had long belonged to autumn anyway: the slaughter season produced the surplus fat you fried them in.
The modern version follows the machine. Adolph Levitt's 1921 doughnut machine let anyone fry circles of batter methodically, and cider-selling farm stands took it up fast. The first commercially produced cider donut may have been the Doughnut Corporation of America's "sweet cider doughnut" in 1951.
Season runs with the apples: September through November or December. Grocery stores put them out as early as August, and Food & Wine has noted that a year-round cider donut is unlikely to have fresh-pressed cider in it.
How it is done Cited · wp-cider-doughnut
Reduce cider, beat it into a cake batter with cinnamon and nutmeg, drop rings, fry, and roll in sugar while hot.
Today Cited · wp-cider-doughnut
Sold at orchards, cider mills and farm stands as part of a day out, and by the half-dozen at the register of every farm store in the Northeast in October.
The particulars
| dough | cake |
|---|---|
| finish | sugared |
| region | New England, Upstate New York, The Upper Midwest |
| confidence | high · updated 2026-09-16 |
Who it runs with
Who talks about it
Pictures
Where we got it
- Cider doughnut — Wikipedia · link
Where it came from: Cited a source we name · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Tradition what the tradition says, hedged · Inference this project's reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.