“The National Doughnut Dunking Association has always credited the invention of its pet provender to a Maine sea captain named Hanson Gregory….{In 1847) objecting to the soggy center in his mother fried cakes, {the Rockport native} is said to have remarked, ‘Why don’t you cut a hole in the middle where it doesn’t cook?’ …But now a Cape Cod historian places the event earlier by a good two hundred years. It seems that one day back in the seventeenth century a Nauset Indian playfully shot an arrow through a fried cake his squaw was making. The squaw, frightened, dropped the perforated patty into a kettle of boiling grease – and the result was the doughnut.’’

-- From The Gold Cook Book (1970), by Louis P. De Gouy