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Published 2015
Perhaps the first reference to a doughnut-like pastry comes from Athenaeus, in the Deipnosophists (third century c.e.). Enkrides is “a small pastry deep-fried in olive oil and covered with honey afterward,” he writes, a description that could easily apply to current Greek loukomades, though whether they were yeast-raised, as they are now, is anybody’s guess. See athenaeus. Doughnut predecessors also pop up in the medieval Muslim sources. Zalabia (the spelling varies) and luqmat al-qadi sometimes took the form of yeast-raised lumps of dough, as they do today. Morocco’s doughnut-shaped sfenj have a clear ancestor in a recipe for isfunj found in an anonymous thirteenth-century Andalusian cookbook. See middle east; north africa; and zalabiya.