Do you shout or just think, “Me want cookie!” when you pass a bakery or stroll down the cookie aisle?
We’re all secret cookie monsters. And it’s been going on for over 1,400 years.
According to Wikipedia, “cookies appear to have their origins in seventh century AD Persia, shortly after the use of sugar became relatively common in the region.” It probably began when bakers needed to test the temperature in their ovens – without thermostats and electricity. They dropped small, round “test” cakes to make sure the oven was hot. These “test cakes” were the first cookies – and people loved them.
The Muslims brought their “cookies” along when they conquered Spain in the 700s.
Italians argue that the pizzelle was first, in the 800s, at south-central Abruzzo. The legend says that the village was overrun with snakes. A Benedictine monk, Dan Domenico, got rid of the snakes and they celebrated with pizzelles. They were made by pressing the dough into an iron that stamped patterns like a family crest, snowflake, or decorative design. (see below).
Either way, by the end of the fourteenth century most people had become cookie monsters (predating the Sesame Street critter by centuries).
According to What’s Cooking America, a 1596 cookbook, Goode Huswife’s Jewel, included a recipe for “fine cakes, a type of shortbread cookie made with flour, butter, egg yolks, sugar, cloves, and saffron.” It was one of many cookie recipes showing up in cookbooks.
The first American cookies were brought by the Dutch when they arrived in the 1600s. They introduced the koekje – little cake – later Anglicized to cookie.
English and Scottish argue that they brought the first cookies to the New World with English tea cakes and Scottish shortbread.
Cookie recipes showed up in American cookbooks with creative names like Jumbles, Plunkets, and Cry Babies – totally unrelated to flavor.
Seventeenth and eighteenth-century American cookies were usually teacakes and shortbread. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century when trains brought new ingredients like fruit, nuts, coconuts, and oranges, that things began to change.
Bakers got more creative.
For example, Animal Crackers (originally “Animals”) were manufactured in the late 1800s. They were associated with the beloved P.T. Barnum Circus and packaged in a box with circus critters and handle (see below).
Author and journalist, Christopher Morley wrote a tasty poem that began:
Animal crackers and cocoa to drink
That is the finest supper I think.
Today you get 22 cookies in a box, including tigers, elephants, camels, and monkeys. There are 37 different varieties and according to the South Florida Reporter, 40 million packages are sold every year. That’s a lot of cookie critters.
When electric refrigerators became widely available in the 1930s, icebox cookies were created.
Legend says that Ruth Graves Wakefield made a big mistake in 1937.
Wakefield owned the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts – once a real toll house built in 1709. She baked cookies for her guests. One day she was making “Butter Drop Do” cookies (one of her favorites) when she ran out of baking chocolate. She broke a bar of semisweet chocolate into pieces and added it to the cookie dough. Wakefield figured it would melt together.
It didn’t.
Wakefield had accidently created the first chocolate chip cookie.
The world of cookies was forever changed.
American cookies today are made into shapes, bars, decorated, and flavored. Spicy gingerbread and Christmas cookies are important parts of the holiday. Molasses cookies were eaten by both sides in the Civil War and during the World Wars when sugar was rationed and molasses used as a substitute.
According to market research company, Mintel, the most popular cookie today in the world is chocolate chip “enjoyed by 82% of global consumers.” Business Insider disagrees, giving Oreos the number one spot “enjoyed more than 500 billion times around the world.”
Who’s counting?
Wherever you go on the planet you’ll find cookies. How about fig newtons, fortune cookies, Amish sugar cookies, palmiers (sugar cookies in a pretzel shape), peanut butter cookies, snickerdoodles . . . the list is endless. The leading American cookie brands include Chips Ahoy, Nutter Butter, and Nilla Wafers among many more.
Guinness World Records reports that the largest cookie ever baked weighed 40,000 pounds and was made by Immaculate Baking Company in Massachusetts. The tallest cookie tower was built by the Girl Scouts of Nassau County, NY, who stacked over 28,000 cookies.
Cookies are everywhere. In Israel you can get tahini shortbread and hamantash. In Peru try chocolate alfajores; in France go for colorful macarons or boudoirs (ladyfingers); and in India munch on Karachi biscuits. There’s no end to the variety.
We’re all cookie monsters at heart!
