a wordOlykoek
also: oly koek · oliekoek · oil cake
The word survives because Washington Irving wrote it down.
The Dutch fried dough ball that came to New Amsterdam, and the American donut's direct ancestor: sweetened dough fried in fat, with no hole.
First seen. 1809, in Washington Irving's A History of New York
Irving gives it as the Dutch-family name for balls of sweetened dough fried in hog's fat. Cited · wp-doughnut
The story Cited · wp-doughnut
Dutch settlers brought olykoek — oil cake — to New York in the early eighteenth century. Washington Irving put it in print in his 1809 History of New York: "an enormous dish of balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog's fat, and called dough-nuts, or oly koeks: a delicious kind of cake, at present scarce known in this city, excepting in genuine Dutch families."
The centres of those balls were the problem the ring solved. Elizabeth Gregory, by the Smithsonian's account, put hazelnuts or walnuts in the middle where the dough might not cook through — which is one reading of where the nut in doughnut comes from.
The particulars
| part of speech | noun |
|---|---|
| region | The United States |
| confidence | high · updated 2026-09-16 |
Who it runs with
Who talks about it
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.