Canadians out donut the Americans, and the Europeans??

"Canadians consume more donuts per capita than any other country in the
world."

I noticed that donuts are sold here and there in France but they
are not a big thing. Our local boulangeries don't have them nor
the take-outs stands on the Rue de Rennes-Montparnasse. They
have croissants, and pain au chocolate, and various beignets
but no donuts.

Earl

******

One nationalistic Canadian writes---


Forget the cafés -- our best books will be written in donut shops

BY EDWARD KEENAN

Pick a night in the mid-'90s and there's a good chance I'm sitting in the
Country Style Donuts at Markham Road and Painted Post in Scarborough,
nursing a regular coffee and scribbling into a notebook. On the wood-veneer
table in front me there's an overflowing ashtray, a half-empty ceramic mug
of coffee and a used paperback copy of The Sun Also Rises or The Age of
Reason . I light another cigarette and try to piece together a sentence that
might lead to another sentence that might lead to literature, I stare out
the window over the strip-mall horizon and try to imagine that my donut shop
in Scarborough is analogous to the cafés of Hemingway or Sartre.

An entry in The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French explains how
the now-legendary and sometimes theme-parked cafés of Paris were, during the
Enlightenment, "places where new or subversive ideas could be fairly openly
discussed (though police spies haunted them)." Later, they became home to
the bohemians, some of whom called themselves "the water drinkers" because
that was all they could afford. Later still, the Café de Flore in
St.-Germain-des-Près became the hangout for Sartre and Beauvoir and the
world headquarters for existentialist thought chiefly because, according to
a history of café life in the November, 2002 issue of the English-language
online magazine ParisTempo.com , "The owner was kind to his 'clients' though
they often bought only one small café each day." The magazine piece sums it
up: "[cafés] are the soul of Paris, reflecting the vagaries of neighborhood
life in all its sordid splendor ... they have always been a place to read,
to write, to plot, to dream, even to fall in love."

Subversive, cheap, unhurried, varied and haunted by police: sounds a bit
like Coffee Time, doesn't it? Canada, an evolving culture, has never been as
precious as France. They have a beret stylishly cocked atop their head, we
have a toque pulled down over our eyes, they have red wine and unpasteurized
cheese, we have Molson Canadian and Kraft Dinner. They have cafés, we have
donut shops.

Read, write, plot, dream, fall in love. I have done all of these things in
donut shops, and encountered many people I never otherwise would have. Among
the regulars at that Country Style in Scarborough was a man who called
himself Mr. Smith. He wore a fur hat and a three-piece suit, steered a
shopping cart full of blankets and plastic bags through the parking lot
every night, and told anyone who'd listen about his days as a member of the
Law Society of Upper Canada and the time he went to Ottawa to take care of a
problem with Prime Minister Diefenbaker. There was a heavy, bald man with a
thick accent who'd fought with the German army in WWII, who said he'd been
young and stupid and didn't completely understand at the time what the Nazis
were about. He kept a counter full of people hanging on every word of his
escape from a French prisoner-of-war camp. There was a former drug dealer,
by then doing shift work in a factory, who was fascinated by how focused I
was on reading and writing, and showed me a notebook he carried with him
filled with barely-legible quotations he'd picked up here and there.

In that donut shop and others through the years I have seen first dates and
breakups, witnessed the conclusions to many drunken pub crawls, overheard
conversations about politics and religion and philosophy.

French cafés were a variation of the 17th-
century English coffee houses (themselves a refinement of the Turkish coffee
houses of Istanbul), which gave rise to Addison and Steele's The Tattler and
The Spectator , England's influential first magazines. Since widespread
romanticization of the Parisian café in the early 20th century, the model
seems to have for a while been frozen. Celebrated coffee house societies in
Greenwhich Village and San Francisco, for example, closely followed the
Parisian model. The donut shop, with its chain-store reliability and
disposable decor, is a distincly late-20th century innovation in this
centuries-old tradition.

The Canadian donut shop is undeniably down-market -- the fluorescent
lighting, the veneer and primary colours, the (recently-installed) one-touch
cappuccino machines, the polyester-uniformed staff -- but unlike the artier
independent coffee houses and frappa-mocha-venti-expenseaccino corporate
chains that supposedly made coffee cool again, donut shops possess next to
no self-conscious hipness or pretentious exclusivity. No one I know would
ever wonder if they needed to stop home and change into a more attractive
outfit lest they seem underdressed at the Baker's Dozen. They are also
universally affordable -- a half-hour of pan-handling can net enough for a
cup of hot coffee and a few hours out of the cold.

More than any place in the world, Canada has embraced the donut shop.
Consider, for example, that Tim Hortons, with over 2,100 locations, has four
times as many donut shops per capita in Canada than the most popular
American chain, Dunkin' Donuts, has in the U.S. Canadians consume more
donuts per capita than any other country in the world. All of this leaving
aside for a moment that donut shops really aren't about donuts. Popular
recurring sketches on both This Hour has 22 Minutes and Royal Canadian Air
Farce featuring regular folks talking politics in donut shops show more
accurately the role of the donut shop in Canada: they're cultural hubs.

In "The Canadian donut shop -- a family thing," an essay published online, a
(strangely anonymous) author explains why he likes writing in a local donut
shop: "I've noticed that we've all become a family. There's Adam, the other
writer; Dalton, the stoner; Kyle, the artist; Jason, the brawler; and a
whole gallery of others." He describes heated conversations about God and
group trips to the bowling alley. "Our family," he says, "accepts everyone."

Mita Sen-Roy at Rain Barrel (hosted by geocities) says donut shops are "one
of the few places where all of humanity can meet. Where else can you find
Sunday post-church folk sipping coffee beside the post-party hangover folk?
.... both delinquent and cop, grannie and teen gangs, grunt manual workers
and high-tech new media wage slaves, immigrants and blue bloods...."

Not everyone shares this view of donut shops as Canadian institutions.
Responding in a speech to a Saturday Night corporate back rub of Tim Hortons
in September, 1999 that asked in its headline (but did not address in the
text) "What does it say about us that our only truly national institution is
a donut shop?" left-wing polemicist Linda McQuaig said: "It's sort of funny
but at the same time its just absolutely ludicrous. I confess I like donuts
and coffee as much as the next person. But, to call Tim Hortons a national
institution is ludicrous.... I've been into dozens of Tim Hortons shops and
nobody ever talks to others. All you do is you line up and pull out your
wallet and you pay."

Which may be all McQuaig does when she goes to donut shops, but her
dismissal seems broad. McQuaig's larger point was that donut shops don't
offer the type of shared vision and collective project that Tommy Douglas
would have hoped for in a Canadian institution, but for her to dismiss the
millions of Canadians for whom donut shops serve as a sort of town hall
smacks of elitism of a most un-Sartrean kind.

The idea of the donut shop as gathering place has been the subject of more
serious, if ridiculed, academic study. York University sociologist Steve
Penfold was awarded the 1999 Ig Nobel prize (awarded by the American humour
magazine Annals of Improbable Research for research that "cannot or should
not be reproduced") for his Ph.D. thesis on the sociology of the Canadian
donut shop. Penfold examined Canadian donut shop culture as a complex
phenomenon where many aspects of society intersect.

But for all that donut shops may have in common with Parisian cafés as
cultural gathering places, there remains one large point of contrast. I have
yet to encounter an intellectual movement, or a widespread school of art or
of literature, that calls the donut shop home. Calls to publishers and
agents requesting interviews with writers who work or hang out in donut
shops drew perplexed silences. Internet searches for fiction portraying
donut-shop society yielded nothing. It seems the mythologizing of this
national cultural institution has not yet begun.

So may I humbly submit that it begin he it was in donut shops that I
conceived and wrote a good deal of my first (as yet unpublished) novel.
Future biographers take note: I was broke then and the lighting was bad, but
I was happy, for I was young and in love and had a place to sit and drink
coffee.

Earl Evleth wrote:
"Canadians consume more donuts per capita than any other country in the
world."

I noticed that donuts are sold here and there in France but they
are not a big thing. Our local boulangeries don't have them nor
the take-outs stands on the Rue de Rennes-Montparnasse. They
have croissants, and pain au chocolate, and various beignets
but no donuts.

Earl



AFAIK, a beignet is a doughnut.

then you don't know what a bignet is.

"nitram" wrote in message
...
On 1 Jun 2005 07:10:57 -0700, wrote:

then you don't know what a bignet is.

You are right, what is a bignet?

Its like a littlenet but a but bigger

On 1/06/05 15:53, in article , "emilia"
wrote:

AFAIK, a beignet is a doughnut.

It has no hole and can have a fruit stuffing-the beignet au pomme is common

"Earl Evleth" wrote in message
...
On 1/06/05 15:53, in article , "emilia"
wrote:

AFAIK, a beignet is a doughnut.

It has no hole and can have a fruit stuffing-the beignet au pomme is
common


Holeless doughnuts arent unknown in the UK and the
apple and jam filled varieties are rather common.

Keith



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wrote:
then you don't know what a bignet is.


No. I have no idea what a bignet it.
A beignet is a doughnut with no hole. Sometimes they are square.




*** Beignet ***
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A beignet is a pastry made from *fried dough* and sprinkled with
confectioners' sugar. This variety is similar to zeppole. In the United
States they are often found in, and typically associated with, the city
of New Orleans, Louisiana and the restaurant Café du Monde. Beignets are
also found in France, where they are sometimes filled with fruit.

In certain parts of France a beignet can incorporate meats.



*** Doughnut ***
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A doughnut, or donut, is a *deep-fried piece of dough or batter*. The
two most common shapes are the flattened sphere, which is injected with
jam/jelly or another sweet filling; and the torus-shaped ring doughnut,
which was traditionally formed by wrapping the dough around a stick but
now is made with a cutter leaving a small piece cut from the center
which is separately cooked as a doughnut hole.

Earl Evleth wrote:
On 1/06/05 15:53, in article , "emilia"
wrote:


AFAIK, a beignet is a doughnut.


It has no hole and can have a fruit stuffing-the beignet au pomme is common


Not all doughnuts have holes.

nitram wrote:
On Wed, 01 Jun 2005 17:25:43 +0200, Earl Evleth
wrote:


On 1/06/05 15:53, in article , "emilia"
wrote:


AFAIK, a beignet is a doughnut.

It has no hole and can have a fruit stuffing-the beignet au pomme is common


Referred to as donuts in New Orleans

http://www.crescentcitybeignets.com/beignet.html

and a square donut with no hole

http://www.answers.com/topic/beignet



They are not always square. The ones from New Orleans tend to be square.

Here is a nice list of doughnuts from all over the world. Scroll down
the page to "Types" & then there's a nice country list.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doughnut

(No, I'm not Canadian)

On 1/06/05 18:02, in article ,
"nitram" wrote:

Holeless doughnuts arent unknown in the UK and the
apple and jam filled varieties are rather common.

They only seem to be unknown by Earl

As donuts yes, unknown, but as beignets I know them.

A beignet is lighter than a donut. It does not taste
like a donut of my youth (cake donuts)

Earl