Steve penfold biography

As a child, I dutifully reported to Hebrew school two nights a week, a painful ritual that was only tempered by my detour to nearby Bentley’s Donuts.

Choking back the cigarette smoke and the leer of shifty tow truck drivers, I’d deposit my quarters on the counter and receive my handheld bounty: Toronto’s greatest Hawaiian doughnut. Iced in a shell of soft vanilla frosting, it was layered with a rainbow confetti of long sugary sprinkles that burst upon my teeth with each blissful bite.

By indulging myself with a doughnut I was participating in a great, and surprisingly recent, ritual of Canadian mass consumption.

In The Donut: A Canadian History, Steve Penfold, an assistant professor of history at the University of Toronto, dissects the evolution of the doughnut in Canada, carefully showing readers how these “banal” fried rings of dough have grown into a national symbol