“The Doughnuts,” about a boy and a doughnut machine gone wild, has always been my favorite Homer Price story and today I brought it home.
I don’t know how old Homer was when the doughnut machine showed up in his life. I think Robert McCloskey wrote and illustrated the story for publication in 1943. I might have read it eight or so years after my birth in 1949. Homer lived in Centerburg, Ohio. I knew right off the bat that we had something in common. I was born in Newark, Ohio, although we lived in married-student housing on the nearby Denison University campus in Granville, Ohio, right in the doughnut hole of that so very settled state. I’m guessing that Robert McCloskey and I had a fondness for doughnuts in common, too. And there was a name thing. My grandfather was Homer Wilbur Robertson. He was from central Ohio and liked anything sweet, in addition to limburger cheese.
At any rate, at age 72, with McCloskey’s story still wafting around my brain and Homer Price collections still on my bookshelf, I just made my first batch of doughnuts here in Placitas, New Mexico.
I’m not sure why I never attempted this before but what sent my into action was discovering a recipe for baked apple cider doughnuts in the New York Times. It might have been the baked rather than fried part that turned the trick. I also like anything with apples. Thank you, Erin Jeanne McDowell and, of course, Robert McCloskey.
See Granville ….
dream ranch 