I did not grow up on doughnuts; we were not a junk food household.  I’d have them occasionally, of course.  I was always jealous of a friend whose old man would disappear the mornings after sleepovers and return to leave a box of Krispy Kreme on the kitchen table to greet us on the way from the bedroom to the den to catch Saturday morning cartoons.  I came to adore Krispy Kreme (at the store, you could watch a massive, sweating, silver machine turn out newborn doughnut after doughnut after doughnut).  I also worked briefly at age 16 for Dunkin Donuts (who trucked their doughnuts in from some unseen source twice a day) and eventually came to lament that Dunkin secured a niche on the country’s coffee addiction train and spread its subpar sugar rings across the national landscape, forcing Krispy Kreme to the fringes.

Living in New York City, I have been lucky enough to discover the Doughnut Plant.  Eating at the Doughnut Plant was my first step to experiencing the doughnut as art; they do things like stuff handmade doughnuts with homemade peanut butter and glaze them with homemade jam, buy bushels of in-season lavender from the farmers market for a beautiful gray-blue glaze, concoct tres leches cake donuts and other artisanal delights.  Stumbling upon this place was like stumbling upon El Dorado when the most precious metal previously known was tin.

But gold isn’t the only precious metal (it’s softer than Sabbath) any more than the Doughnut Plant’s gilded doughnuts are the only doughnuts.  The hands-down, full-on, good-goddamn-a’mighty culinary work of art at the Bonnaroo Music Festival this year was the Amish Baking Company’s doughnuts. 

How could I possibly do justice to these mothers in word?  If the Doughnut Plant turns out Bruegels, Amish Baking turns out Rothkos.  Their doughnuts are full-bodied, almost deep in the way they are so thoroughly plain, simple, perfect.  Having the human pleasure—let’s own up to it, joy!—of fried dough and sugar in your mouth and stomach is elemental to our eating history in the same way that getting swallowed by shifting red or creeping gray canvases is elemental to the raw experience of our human moods.  Flour, oil, and sugar have been with us a long time.  So have the principal emotional ingredients that compose our reaction to the world.  It’s fantastic that Bruegel the Elder painted rich and detailed scenes of Medieval common folk, but sometimes you just want something as straightforward as a throbbing red square.

Not to say that the Amish doughnuts aren’t rich.  They are stupefyingly rich.  They are let-me-lay-down-in-the-shade-to-digest rich.  They are spongy and airy and dripping with warm sugar.  They cannot be topped.

I asked the woman at the counter—who, smiling, round-cheeked, and blond haired was about as story-book American pastoral as could be—the key to the deliciousness.  “It’s a secret recipe that our grandma made,” she said.

“Okay.  What are the number of ingredients, can you tell me that?  Are there like ten or are there like three?”

“We can’t say.”

“Nice.  What makes them so good?”

(At this point in the exchange, my voice recorder captured my brother, somewhere just at the edge of the mic’s range, whisper, “Hell, yes” in tones of deep, animal satisfaction.)

“Lots of love,” the woman said.  “We don’t add any calories, we just add lots of love.”

Please.  Rarely has any single piece of food so completely weighed down my stomach, but rarely has any single piece of food made me so excited to share its existence with others.  Eating it was a shock.  The need to blab was the need to proclaim a great discovery.

The majority of the people that comprised the ceaseless human machine that turned these things out for 84-straight festival hours were actually Mennonite, not Amish, but maybe that just came down to folks’ comfort levels with a massive, temporary festival city based around humming, crackling technology.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that I have long been a fan of a pared-down life that does much with less, and though I am grateful for the inventive and delectable doughnuts I can find in New York, I enjoyed at Bonnaroo a luscious, fundamental, clean-&-simple happiness that was such a revelation yet somehow so familiar.