Been a while since we’ve gone out to eat, of course, but we haven’t been that keen on takeout lately either. On Sunday morning, I decided to drive to the nearest doughnut shop, an independent, and bring home a dozen. Here they are, a selection of creme-filled delights, since that’s what we prefer.
The siren call of doughnuts is pretty strong, but we only buy them every two or three months. Call this latest box our quarterly ration, then, comfort food for uncomfortable times.
For the first time ever, I bought doughnuts using the drive-through. Not just the first at this shop, the first time anywhere. Not bad, just not my typical method. Given my druthers, and until now I’ve always been given my druthers in the matter of doughnuts, I go into the shop to buy a selection. The rows of cheap pastry, from the alluringly plump creme-filled offerings to the scrawny cake doughnuts, wait behind the counter, available not for self-serve, but upon request of another human being.
Ritual selection, it is. Eye the doughnuts, determine what the shop has that you and your party might want — it’s always good to know the tastes of your immediate family in these matters — order two or three or four of this or that, until your dozen is complete. Does anyone ever say to the clerk, just give me a dozen of your choice? Do such devil-may-care people exist? It’s a large world, so they must. But I’ll never be that person.
I’ve been ordering doughnuts for 50 years, that’s why. In our early years in San Antonio, we would sometimes stop at a doughnut shop on the way home from church on Sunday. By ca. 1970, maybe even a little earlier, I’d be tasked as an eight- or nine-year-old to go get the dozen doughnuts.
It was a Dunkin Donuts. I mention that not as an ad — that brand hasn’t been a preferred choice of mine for many years — but to note that it must have been a new franchise in those days, since the brand exploded out of New England only in the 1960s. I never associated it with New England, at least not then. It was merely a likable doughnut shop. It did not, as it does now, distance itself from its pastry origins.
That shop, on Broadway near the Witte Museum, is long gone. A meat shop is in the building now.
A meat shop associated with the restaurant next door, Smoke Shack, which hasn’t been there long, though some kind of restaurant has been next to the former Dunkin’ Donuts since I can remember.
If you look closely at Meat Market, you can see its doughnut past — the glass wall showing most of the store interior, where people sat to drink their coffee, and the part of the building on the right behind brick, which is where the doughnuts were made.