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Guess what Will? What's that Mango?
So you know what I think is completely underrated, like criminally underrated, is Intimen's Donuts.
Oh heck, yeah, I'm with John.
I mean, when I was a kid, I loved Intimate so much, and today I feel like you only see occasional references to them. You know, you might see him on Seinfeld or sometimes on thirty Rock episodes where Tina fags them a shoutout. But as a kid, I loved anytime my mom brought home those powdered donuts or or even the chocolate covered ones as a tree. And you know, I just thought mister and missus Edemon must have been like the luckiest person in the world because they could
just snag donuts whenever they wanted. But it turns out there actually was an actual mister Entemen and a whole family of Entemens. They started with a bakery in Brooklyn and then they moved out to Breezy Bay, Shore Long Island, and they were kind of a big deal. Like they used to sell cakes to franksin Natra. Did you know that I did not know this. No, yeah, it's pretty amazing. And then eventually they started selling straight to grocery stores across the country. But I actually had no idea how
big their operation was. They ran a fourteen acre pastream factory turning out delicious donuts along with crumbcakes and other treats that I'm sure everyone knows about. But that's like twelve football fields lined up just for delicious doughnuts.
And that would have been a dream as a kid, you know. And I throw in as a kid so as not tap to embarrass myself by saying, it's actually a dream now to just be able to go stand around that many donuts. That's wild, I know, I know.
But when the longest serving entimen, Charles, died a couple of years ago at the healthy age of ninety two, do you know what his sun revealed?
What's that that he.
Never ate the treats? His son said, he just wasn't a dessert guy. Is that insane?
That is ridiculous and one of the saddest things I've ever heard.
I know, But it's just one of nine facts you absolutely have to know about donuts.
So let's dig in. Hey, their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend Mangesh hot Ticketter and on the other side of the soundproof glass. Oh, this is an interesting one, Mango. Dylan has this big sign and it says no donut left behind. Yeah, he's looking really serious about this, and he's got a whole bunch of pastries out on the table. I think he's got some Zeppees, some Cruilers, some Munchkins, the whole variety here. I think
there's actually some Berliners in there. So apparently he wants to shed some light on the varieties of donuts without holes and give them their due. You know, Dylan is just so considerate, he really is. That's our friend and producer of course, and Fagan. So, Mango, are you a big donut guy? I mean I like donuts. I find them delightful with coffee.
We've got a donut plant nearros so we go out to donuts occasionally, but they're not generally something I crave these days. You know, when I'm around them, I definitely eat too many. But weirdly, my biggest memory with donuts is from when I was a kid. Our pediatric dentist was right next to a Dunkin Donuts, and every time I was done with an appointment, we would go get a donut.
And it just feels so.
I get a sugar retreat after, you know, take care of your teeth and get fluoride on them or whatever.
That makes me like your parents that much more. Mango, that's pretty awesome.
And my dentist was also awesome. So like, the whole experience was wonderful. But are you a donutut?
I love donuts, Mango, and I actually you were talking about Intemen's earlier. So there's another variety called donuts. I don't know if you call them donuts or donuts what I'm really sure they come in the little bags. And so you know this. There's a g people that I get together every year. We go to a different place around the country and we make up our own race
somewhere in the woods. And every year, and I'm not making this up, we always bring bags of chocolate and white powdered donuts and everybody gets one and you hold it up in the air for a photo and then you eat it because it gives you that TurboPower to run the race. I don't know where the science is behind that, but we do that every year. But there's a lot of signs behind that, so much science behind it. It helps you run super great in the woods. It's
specifically the woods. A donut helps you run. But anyway, we should eventually get into this episode, So why don't you start by giving us just a little bit of donut background on why we're doing this show on donuts.
Yeah. So one of the interesting things about donuts is that they're just about every culture in some form, Like the Smithsonian says that there are fossils of fried dough on ancient indigenous settlements in the Southwest, And of course you can still eat like incredibly yummy fried dough and fry bread and soapapias from indigenous bakers there today. And I don't think you can overstate just how much donuts
actually tie the world together. At least three of the world's major religions have traditions of fried dough for key celebrations, including Hanukkah, Ramadan and Bennet's for like Fat Tuesday and Carnival. And with over ten billion donuts made in the US each year, Americans really can't get enough. So with today's episode, we thought, you know, maybe we could bring the whole world together with something delicious and celebrate the donuts many gifts to modern mankind.
So what fact do you want to kick off with today? I just got chill bumps with you, say, bit, that's pretty great. Well, you know my fondness for maritime history, so naturally my first fact comes from the sea. So without a sailor and a bunch of queasy stomachs at sea, we might not have the standard donut shape that we're all super familiar with. And it goes back to about eighteen forty seven. There was a sailor named Hanson Gregory and he was making his way up the maritime corporate ladder.
He was actually only sixteen years old, which I guess at that point that wasn't super young, but still that's impressive. Exactly, So, Gregory was working on ships in the lime trade, and this was off the coast of his native state of Maine. So his mother, like any good mother, would pack donuts to see with him. And these aren't just to send him like a taste of home, but apparently also as a way to word off scurvy.
Now I don't normally think of donuts as like a way to ward off scurvy, So what was special about these donuts?
I did not either, but miss Gregory might have because she put lemon rind into her cakes. At that point in time, in the early US, donuts were just big lumps of dough that were fried in animal fat. Now, on the upside, they were supposed to keep well, which is why she prepared her spiced and lemon scented cake that way. But on the downside, Hanson said that the
donuts were so greasy. In fact, the donuts would often just sort of sit in his fellow sailors tummies and it would give them aches and pains and just make them pretty uncomfortable. So why is that Well, part of the reason is that they often weren't cooked through completely.
But Gregory had a solution to this. So the way he tells it, and this is actually reported in the Washington Post back in nineteen sixteen, when Gregory was back on land in the town of Quincy, Massachusetts, he took a tin cap to a pepper jar and started cutting out the oily undercook centers of these donuts. And then
later on one of his short leaves. He had a tinsmith make him this cutter that would help make that hole in the center, and he left it with his mother to make new donuts with this hole taken out, and she started selling them around home and they just kind of took off. So fried dough without the greasy center, what's not to like about this?
So, I mean, obviously, like you're taking out this disgusting middle part that isn't cooked through, Like, does he end up copyriting this ten like, you know, he's improved the donut in a major way.
Now, Yeah, it's a really good question. So Hanson actually told the Post, I don't suppose Perry could patent the North Pole or Columbus could pat in America. Instead, he let the world have his delicious innovation. But that didn't keep him from bragging about what he brought to the table here.
So I'm guessing he doesn't get a piece of like this multi billion dollar donut industry.
All of which really has him to think, Yeah, it's really wild. If he knew what was eventually coming, he might have wanted more of a piece of it, but he certainly kept the bragging rights, and wildly enough, he told the Post that story from a sailor's retirement home in Quincy, Massachusetts, which is also the home of the original Dunkin Donuts just thirty five years later. Anyway, I thought that was pretty interesting. So what he got next to mego?
So the next fact I have is that donuts were named in the nineteen thirty four Chicago World's Fair, which was referred to as the Century of Progress Fair, and they were declared the food hit of the century. Now, oddly enough, donuts were supposed to be a vision of the future, and the reason kind of goes back to the same issue Henson Gregory was trying to solve for. So donuts cooked in vats of lard were super, super greasy.
In fact, the original Dutch name for that kind of donut that became really popular in New York and up and down the Eastern Seaboard was oily cake, which you know, doesn't sound so appetizing.
It's not great branding.
But more than that, doughnuts were also really really stinky, Like they had this foul smell that theatergoers in New York City actually like complained about because these stale oily aromas were just waffed through the air. And so there was this theater in New York. There's a Russian Jewish immigrant named Adolph Levitt, and he was frying up donuts the traditional way. But then he comes up with something in genius and he invents a way to keep all that funk and closed with a donut machine.
Well that's a brilliant move. So how did he do that? Was it maybe a little less hog fat or what? Yeah, I mean that's part of it.
But it took him from nineteen twenty when he had this idea to nineteen thirty one when he debuted this spectacular machine in the window of his Mayflower Donuts in Harlem, New York. It was the same machine he took to the nineteen thirty four World Spare and that he sold through catalogs to bakeries around the country. The machine used forty percent less oil than traditional methods, but even better than all of that, he used blowers to get rid of the smell, and I enclosed the whole process and
glass which you kept in the odor. But most importantly, donuts became entertainment.
Oh wow, that long ago. So when I think of this whole thing, like watching donuts go across the conveyor belt. That whole bit. I associate that with Krispy Kreme, like my kids used to love going to those stores. In two hundreds pro sets the belt that forever and ever. Is this the precursor to that?
Or what?
Yeah? Totally is.
So his machine drew crowds to the windows. In fact, the New Yorker covered it for Talk of the Town and they wrote, quote, doughnuts float dreamily through a grease canal and a glass enclosed machine, walk dreamily up a moving ramp, and tumble dreamily into an outgoing basket.
It is.
And for all of that dreaminess, it was an efficient machine. It actually cranked out twelve hundred doughnuts every hour. And that meant that not only could he draw people in with the excitement of watching this automated process, which felt like watching the future, but he could all also sell them fresh. People could get hot doughnuts by the dozens, and it no longer bothered neighbors because the problem with
the smell was completely dealt with. So mister Levitt that first year he cleared twenty five million dollars, which is about a half billion dollars today. And Levitt's business partner made it sound like God's work. He said that the machine quote has taken the donut out of the mire of prejudice that surrounded the heavy, grease soaked product of the old oaken bucket and made it into a light, puffy product of a machine. It's so amazing that all
of this is documented. But one last thing about Levitt and his machine. Arthur Levitt was an avowed optimist, and all around his Mayflower Donuts he had printed quote, as you go through life, make this your goal.
Wash the donut, not the hole. That's pretty awesome. I mean, I don't know exactly what it means, but it has no meaning, but it's also pretty great. I love it, and I can only imagine that kind of optimism is what got Fred the Baker into the donut business. Do you remember Fred the Baker? Mango, of course, time to make the donuts. Yes, he sounded a little weary and didn't sound super optimistic about it, but he's the subject
of our next fact. So for younger listeners, Fred the Baker was an iconic character in the Duncan Donuts ads from nineteen eighty one all the way up till nineteen ninety seven. So you'd see him clocking at the store before dawn, heading back to make the donuts. And the whole idea was to show that these donuts were always being made fresh right there at Duncan, unlike supermarkets, which I guess is where everybody else was buying donuts. Anyway.
It was played by a character actor and named Michael Vale, who had a poor man's Tom Selleck stash about him, and the ad campaign was this huge hit. People loved Fred the Baker. But after about fifteen years, Duncan was ready to move on to a new campaign. Sure, but they worried what might happen given just how much everybody loved Fred. So Duncan decided to do their due diligence and they asked customers what they would think if Fred the Baker just kind of stopped showing up in commercials,
maybe moved off to a farm somewhere. And guess what they said. I mean, I'd expect people to argue for his job. Almost they actually argued for him to get retirement. Apparently they said Fred could leave if he were treated like an honored friend and employee. So Duncan Donuts gave him a big retirement party including a parade in Boston and free donuts to over six million customers on his retirement day. This was September twenty second, nineteen ninety seven,
and it's a sad little coda. Four years later, actor Michael Vale actually died about the same exact time that Duncan stopped making their donuts in store. No more Fred Baker in all the senses. That's really interesting.
You know, I kind of want to see that survey because it feels like, you know, if the options are Firefred or give him a big retirement party including a parade, like of course.
People are going to choose that. Yeah, yeah, which which ones of these would you choose?
So? Yeah, okay, Well, the s fifth fact is about a man named Ted Nagoy and he's actually the reason that four out of five donut shops in southern California are owned by Cambodian refugees and their families.
I've actually always thought that was fascinating. So how did Cambodians get so involved in US donut culture?
So Ted came to the US in nineteen seventy five. This was with a wave of nearly half a million refugees from Cambodia, where at the time the dictator Polpod and the Khmer Rouge had taken over, and those immigrants by and large came to the US through Camp Pendleton, which is south of Orange County.
Now.
Eventually, Ted got a job as a janitor in a church in the OC and another job as a gas station attendant overnight. And while he was working at this gas station, he saw what a great business the donut shop next door was. Eventually he was tempted to go over to try a donut on one of his breaks, and he found out that donuts were not only delicious,
it actually felt kind of familiar. So numb Kong is this treat from Cambodia that was fried dough made in a ring shape, you know, just like donuts, except numb kong were made out of rice flour. And he really loved these donuts. He became a regular and he thought about selling them himself. So he asked a woman at the counter, was there any hope for him to own a shop like this, and they actually suggested he applied
to the management program for their donut chain, which was Winchel's. Now, he convinced the pastor at his church where he was janitor to sponsor him, and the pastor obliged, and he became the first Southeast Asian to go through this program. Now, of course, he made a big change when he started managing his own shop. He put his wife, Sangatini and his kids to work. He barely slept. But you know, in actually not that long, he had enough to buy
a local donut shop called Christie's. Now, what's interesting about Ted is he didn't change the name or the donuts they sold. He just made them around the clock, like these really fresh and really tasty donuts. Thanks to his and his family's tirelessness, within a year, he bought three more shops. By nineteen eighty, just five years after arriving in the US, he owned twenty shops, and even crazier, he didn't change the names in any way or show
that they were connected. He really wasn't building a brand. He was just keeping these mom and pop donut shops going. And as he went he brought his community with him. So workers, managers, shop owners themselves all came from his friends and family, and in fact, my friend Vana's family had a shop around that area too. But in addition to the reason why, like Cambodians owned donut shops in southern California. He's also responsible for why donut shops use pink boxes.
Oh wow, so why is that?
So? When Ted was sourcing boxes for his donut shops, he experienced, you know, serious sticker shock when he was looking at the white boxes that bakeries were using, and he asked like, did they have anything cheaper? And apparently there was a bunch of leftover pink card stock from this other client. It was much much cheaper. Also, it was kind of reminiscent of the color red, which is so important to Asian cultures and businesses and particularly ethnically
Chinese people like his own. Anyway, before four long, donut shops around the country had picked up on this iconic box color. And you look at things like Voodoo Donuts today from Portland, their logo and boxes are pink. And it's all thanks to this money saving venture from this immigrant on the hustle. Actually, though, there's one last fact. When Ted's wife, Sangatini, became a US citizen, she actually took the name Christie's after their first thoughbut shop.
So pretty sweet. That is a great story, all right, Well, here's one thing that always bugged me. So you know that famous speech by JFK at the Berlin Wall was back in nineteen sixty three, and he says, I beIN ein Berliner, right, And it's supposed to be this really stirring moment where he's expressing solidarity with the people of Berlin who now have a big wall between the Communists
and the Democratic sides. But then everyone there laughed at it because in Germany that doesn't mean I'm a citizen of Berlin. It means I am a jelly donut. Not quite so stirring here, And as people know, there was a bit of laughter in the audience, but the laughter actually wasn't immediate. It came a minute later when Kennedy said, I appreciate my interpreter translating my German.
So clearly people there didn't take the Berliner line as a joke. They were actually laughing at this later comment by Kennedy. So how do we get the story about the jelly donut.
Well, if you order a Berliner at a bakery and the rest of Germany, you will get a jelly donut. But Berliners themselves don't call jelly donuts after themselves they call them fan Kuchen. Now, the story actually originates with a British novelist, Lynn Dayton, who wrote a book with an unreliable narrator who claims that ik ben ein Berliner was a joke and that German cartoonist had a field day with the gaff the next day, but none of that was actually true. It was part of his fictional
character's unreliability. So the New York Times repeated the story in their review, and then it got repeated in American publications for years and years. But with the advent of Wikipedia, the Germans finally put the myth to rest. So in the German Wikipedia entry about the speech, it has a heading labeled quote misconception of the English World. So anyway, it's pretty interesting.
That's amazing. I feel like you hear that joke everywhere, from like Eddie Izard to you know, mention that it's just repeated. But uh, that's funny that that's a total misconception. I actually have a great fact I can't wait to tell you, but we've got to hit up some ads first, so don't touch that dial.
Welcome back to Part time Genius. We're talking about one of our favorite topics donuts? All right, mango, what do you have next? Well?
Did you know that the phrase dollars to donuts like I bet dollars to donuts before donuts was dollars to buttons, which is just.
Such a super scus fun.
I mean, dollars to doughnuts also makes no sense, but dollars buttons just sounds weaker. So I want to go the fact in, but I actually have it. Another fact, and is that did you know that dunking your donuts in coffee is officially considered bad manners?
I did not know this.
I did not know this, And cops all over the country are being problematic to people like Emily Post who wrote this about them in nineteen forty one. So apparently, in nineteen forty one, the Campfire Girls did this annual fundraiser that was a donut drive, and I'm guessing the
girl Scouts had the market cornered on cookies. And anyway, some young enterprising Campfire Girls wrote to Emily Post column to get her endorsement of dunking donuts and coffee, and she flat out refused, like she would not endorse it. She wrote that as much as she would like to agree, with such an upstanding group of young people. Quote, dipping a great round object into a coffee or teacup and then biting into the sopping object is about as bad
an example of table behavior as could be found. But she did suggest a workaround.
That will work. Emily Post always coming up with a solution. So what was it?
So she says, you can break off a piece of your donut, drop it into your coffee, and use a spoon to scoop it out and eat it, and somehow this is better. It does not sound better to be like trying to fish out tiny pieces of donut from your coffee with a spoon.
That sounds terrible. Plus the coffee.
Gets all crumbly it anyway, I have a hard disagree with this one. The founder of Dunkin Donuts, Bill Rosenberg, actually tried to solve it as well, except he tried a different thing. He invented a dunker, which was a regular cake donut, but it had a handle coming off the ring. Do you remember these donuts?
I don't know that I do. Yeah, I don't know.
They were like misshaped donuts that you would dunk, but apparently dunk and sold Dunkers at the chain for years, but they had to be cut by hand, and everyone agreed that they didn't really make the dunking any easier, and so they discontinued it in two thousand and three. All gone, Yeah, so will what do you have for your last facts?
All right, mango? Have you ever heard the term dough boys for soldiers? Yeah, definitely, but I don't really know what it means. Well, the term started in the American Civil War, and there was actually some debate, but it was about how buttons on the soldiers' uniforms looked like flower dumplings, or perhaps that the soldiers polished their metal with flour. But there's another reason to call them dough boys.
During the Civil War, volunteers made massive batches of donuts to serve to the troops, and this was a tradition that continued into World War One, actually on into World War Two. And like we talked about earlier that sailor Hanson Gregory had just invented the ring shaped donut and created the ten cutter. This was something that had become available widely and it was used pretty frequently during the
Civil War. Then in World War One, the Salvation Army actually sent volunteers to France near the stalemated front lines there, and they would make these hot, fresh donuts for the young people serving there to remind them of home.
It's so weird that like there are facts like this that we don't know, you know, Like it feels like, after all these years, I would have heard this. But also I feel like I don't really think of donuts as.
A very American thing. They just feel like, yeah, from around the world, I know, you know. I'm sure they were just happy for something fresh and delicious to eat. But it became this huge hit, and the Salvation Army started to hold these annual fundraisers for veterans. They would call them Donut Day to commemorate the donut lasses or women who sailed to the front lines there, and they'd
make them hand out donuts. The Salvation Army sold these treats as fundraisers and even had eating contests and other stunts to drum up interests and of course more revenue. So the Washington Post reported on this in nineteen twenty two. It was about a donut race being held by the Ellipse just south of the White House with this gigantic sixty eight pound four foot donuts. Now, Donut Day is still celebrated to this day on the first Friday in June.
I feel like we need to make celebrating Donut Day more of a tradition here, definitely. So here's my last fact which kind of blows my mind. Astrophysicists at the University of Leone in France examined images from the earliest times of the universe, and in twenty twenty one they surmise that our universe is just one giant donut.
That's some real science yet again, but actually I have no idea what that means.
Mango. Yeah, so it's obviously not that it's made of flower and fat and yeast. What we're talking about is the shape, and the idea is that the universe is closed in all three dimensions and shaped like a three D donut of truly cosmic but not infinite size. This theory posits that the universe is finite, with the entire cosmos being only three or four times what we can observe now. Astronomers agree that the universe is still flat,
meaning that parallel line state parallel in perpetuity. But while we know as geometry, what these scientists are positing is a different topology where the spatial relationships separate from shapes. It's suggesting that our universe might be multiply connected, and dimensions of our universe will connect back to each other. Now, I know this sounds super confusing, but the astrophysicist Paul Cutter actually explained it really well in an article on
life science, and this is what he said. If you take a flat piece of paper, clearly parallel lines remain parallel. Now you roll it into a cylinder. Still, all parallel lines remain parallel, not diverging or connected. But now curl the ends of the cylinder around to connect them. You have a donut shape. The parallel lines still don't diverge or connect, but the lines are no longer infinite, and knowing this can help us measure the full size of
the universe. It also means that while technically you could travel in one direction and wind up back where you begin, you can't really do that. Like, the universe is constantly expanding, often faster than the speed of light, so you can never really catch up to yourself.
I'm just going to have to take your word for it on this one. That is fascinating but also pretty complicated and in the immortal words of Homer Simpson, donuts is there anything they can't do? You know? Also, I really love the fact that I should be dunking my donuts and pieces with a spoon. So I think we're gonna have to give you the trophy for that one, Mango.
I know it feels so disgusting, and I love that so proper, and I love that I'm going to be a diner's just correcting people from now on. But I will take the trophy. That is it for today's episode. Remember if you've got donut facts to share, drop us a line on our Instagram at Part Time Genius, or you can always email our moms at Petgenius moms at gmail dot com. Now from Gabe, Dylan, Marywill and myself,
thank you so much for listening. And I also have to shout out to my wife Lizzie Jacobs, who research and wrote for this episode. Lizzie is particularly good at taking us on wrong turns on vacations that somehow accidentally find donut shops. Love it, and it happens so much that all of us think it's no longer a coincidence anyway. That is it for this week's Part Time Genius.
Thank you so much for listen.
Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.
This show is hosted by.
Will Pearson and me Mongaige Heatikler and research by our good pal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay, Trustee Dara Potts and Viney Shorey. For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.