a donutGlazed raised

A ring of yeast dough, proofed until it is full of gas, fried about two and a half minutes, then dragged through a thin sugar glaze while it is still hot enough to melt it. The glaze sets into a shell you can hear. Yeast-raised rings run larger and taller than cake rings and average around 38 grams apiece.

The raised ring is the older idea and the harder one to run. Dutch settlers brought olykoek — oil cake — to New Amsterdam in the early eighteenth century, balls of sweetened dough fried in hog fat; Washington Irving put them in print in 1809 as "dough-nuts, or oly koeks". The hole arrives in the middle of the nineteenth century, credited by long habit to Hanson Gregory, a New England sailor who said he punched one out with a tin pepper box in 1847 at sixteen because the middles came out raw.

Tradition holds — that the hole was about heat reaching the centre. Culinary historian Linda Civitello writes that the hole made doughnuts cook faster; food writer Michael Krondl reckons the ring shape came off recipes that called for a jumble, a ring-shaped cookie already on the table. By 1870 a cutter with two concentric circles was on sale and the argument stopped mattering to anyone but historians.

When shops automated in the 1920s the raised dough lost ground: it needs time to rise and it is harder to handle, so machinery and baking soda pushed bakers toward cake. The raised ring survived because it is the one people mean.

Mix a lean, sweet dough with baker's yeast. Let it rise, sheet it, cut rings, then proof the cut rings again in a warm box until they are light enough to float. Fry about 150 seconds at 182 to 190 °C, turning once. Glaze hot: a thin syrup of powdered sugar and water or milk goes on within a minute of the fryer, so it soaks the crust and sets clear.

Every shop in the country sells it and most sell nothing else in that volume. A raised ring goes stale faster than a cake ring, which is why a shop that opened at four in the morning tells you so, and why the tray at noon is not the tray at six.