Confessions Of A Doughnut Eater
There are doughnuts, and then there are doughnuts
Doughnuts And I Go Way Back
My two earliest memories are of food. One involves a hot dog stand, but the other involves a doughnut. This was a jelly doughnut from a bakery in the Vermont town where my Gauthier grandparents lived. It had an incredibly thin crust and an exterior coated with granulated sugar, not confectioners. In addition to being messy, confectioners sugar on a doughnut usually conceals what is a tough hide over a dry interior. The granulated sugar on the doughnut I’m talking about enhanced an unimaginably delicate light brown shell surrounding something cloudlike with a jelly soul.
Yes, there is some serious nostalgia at work here. Nonetheless, that memory is the beginning of what you might call a motif, a recurring element in my life. Doughnuts.
We lived on a farm in those early years, and I remember a bread delivery truck coming to our house. Well, I remember it coming once when my mother, rather foolishly, I think most people would agree, sent a child somewhere between five- and seven-years-old out to pick up the bread order. Which I did. While I was at the truck, though, I told the breadman, “We’ll also take a dozen jelly doughnuts.” I can’t recall exactly what happened after that, but I did…
