a person · MEHanson Gregory
also: Captain Gregory
Claimed the hole and told it the same way for sixty years.
The New England sailor who said he punched the first hole in a donut in 1847, at sixteen, aboard a lime-trading ship.
The story Cited · wp-doughnut
Gregory said he disliked how greasy twisted donuts were and how raw their centres came out, and punched a hole through the middle with the ship's tin pepper box, later teaching his mother the trick. The Smithsonian's account has his mother, Elizabeth Gregory, frying a deep dough that used his spice cargo — nutmeg, cinnamon, lemon rind — and putting hazelnuts or walnuts in the middle where the dough might not cook through.
The claim is one of several. Michael Krondl suggests the ring came from recipes for a jumble, a ring-shaped cookie; Linda Civitello writes the hole made donuts cook faster. By 1870 a cutter with two concentric circles was in production.
Today Cited · wp-doughnut
Nobody has produced a document that settles it, and the story is repeated as settled anyway.
The particulars
| role | inventor |
|---|---|
| state | ME |
| region | New England |
| confidence | high · updated 2026-09-16 |
Who it runs with
Where we got it
- 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.