A Short History of the Cookie

by OWEN ROBERTS

The word "cookie" comes from the Dutch koekje, which means "little cake."  I was not surprised to learn that cookie comes from Dutch, because I once had a Dutch girlfriend, and the language is filled with oo's and ee's.  The only word that she taught me that I still remember was ook, which means "also" or "too."  I thought the word was hilarious and repeated it a lot for a few days. I'm not sure how long we were together after that event.

She and I lived together in a shitty little one bedroom on Berry Street when we first moved to New York. I remember one night I was at home by myself and I was probably either reading or writing something but also getting increasingly hungry. Because our kitchen was mouse-infested that winter, there was never food in it, and probably at the time I hadn't been in the kitchen for weeks.  After a few hours of trying to ignore my hunger I finally gave in and left the apartment to go to the nearest restaurant.  But when I got into the hall I saw a package on the table in by the front door. It was chocolate chip cookies from Mom. I went back in, picked up my book again, and ate an entire package of cookies by myself.

Chocolate chip cookies were accidentally invented by Ruth Wakefield in 1934.  Apparently she used to send diners at her restaurant home with a entire batch of her homemade cookies, from the Toll House restaurant in Massachusetts. Can you imagine someone doing that today? That would be fucking awesome.

Anyway, Wakefield sold her recipe to Nestle for a lifetime supply of chocolate chips. I want to find Wakefield's great-granddaughter and marry her. Then in World War II, soldiers from Massachusetts shared their cookies with other soldiers, who began requesting them from home, which led to a national craze for chocolate chip cookies.

The earliest cookies are generally thought to have appeared in Persia (Iran) during the seventh century. By the end of the fourteenth century, there were little cakes in Paris and other European cities, and Renaissance cookbooks had lots of cookie recipes. Cookies were often eaten by colonialists, because they traveled well.  In early American cookbooks, cookies were included in the cakes section, and had names like "jumbles," "plunkets," and "cry babies." The book American Cookery, written by Amelia Simmons in 1796 has a recipe for "Cookies," which may be the first time the word was printed.  It was the first American cook book.

Cookies were invented in America, although things that resemble cookies have existed as long as baking has.  As Wikipedia puts its, "Cookie-like hard wafers have existed for as long as baking is documented, in part because they deal with travel very well, but they were usually not sweet enough to be considered cookies, by modern standards." Most of the info I'm using comes from Wikipedia, but about one thing they are dead wrong: In the little summary square thing at the top right corner, under "Dish details," "Serving temperature" is described as "cold."  If I was the kind of Internet user that edited Wikipedia pages, I would be all over that shit.

Then Nabisco invented the Oreo, which is apparently the best selling cookie of all time.

I never liked Oreos much. I'm not into prepackaged cookies in general; as you might have guessed, my Mom bakes cookies for me and my sister like it's her job, so I've gotten used to eating really good cookies on a regular basis. At my current apartment, which I've been in since November of last year, I think I've received probably five or six boxes of cookies from Mom. When my sister was staying with me for a while over her winter break from college, we got along really great, except when we were fighting about whether the package of cookies I had received was intended for us to share or not. I used to hide packages of cookies in my room so my roommates wouldn't know about them, but recently, I have been in more of a sharing spirit, and have started leaving them out in the kitchen.

My Mom has two cookie specialties: chocolate chip and peanut butter. Sometimes chocolate chip peanut butter, which is fucking crazy. Her brownies are fucking amazing as well. And pies. Peanut butter cookies were invented by George Washington Carver in 1916.

During the last four months of 2007, I had a nine-to-five job at a video game company, which was pretty terrible. I became addicted to black-and-white cookies. I had never had one before this job, in part because I had only been in New York for a few months when I started. I would have a snack everyday at 4 pm: coffee and a black-and-white. I thought about getting that cookie pretty much all day. Oh, and one time, my sister and I got a black-and-white cookie to share, and I broke it in half and then ate my half, but I didn't realize that I had broken it down the middle, so I got the chocolate side and she got the vanilla side. When she realized that she had only vanilla frosting, and I had already eaten all the chocolate, she threw her half of the cookie on the ground.  I bought her a new one.

I think my sweet tooth can be attributed to my father.  He's addicted to chocolate and he'll take it in pretty much any form, though he prefers dark chocolate bars and chocolate ice cream.  When we're done eating dinner, my dad will stare into space, ignoring anything that is said to him, until we have desert.  He says that he literally can't think of anything but chocolate until he has it.

My own addiction isn't as bad (at least now that the black-and-white cookie phase is over).  I usually don't think about cookies at all, unless they're sitting in front of me, in which case I eat them, pretty much without thinking. So I don't typically buy cookies for myself. It's only in those great moments when a cardboard box with my mother's handwriting scrawled in Sharpie across the front appears in my doorway, or when I visit my parents.

For example, once I drove up to visit my sister at school and found a box of cookies in her room only a moment after entering and putting my stuff down. My sister was doing something and by the time she got back I had eaten the entire box of cookies.

Oh, also, when I was in probably middle school, my sister had a pizelle phase, and she wouldn't let me eat them, because my mom would only get her one box a week or something.

But I didn't even like pizelles, they're like the Josh Groban of cookies. Pizelles were invented in Italy, are maybe the oldest cookie, and, yes, share the same etymology as "pizza".

I love Animal Crackers.  I really like that they have them on JetBlue now.  Apparently there have been thirty-seven different varieties of Animal Crackers since 1902, and by varieties they mean of animals.  The current lineup is tigers, cougars, camels, rhinoceros, kangaroos, hippopotami, bison, lions, hyenas, zebras, elephants, sheep, bears, gorillas, monkeys, seals, and giraffes. Christopher Morley wrote a poem about them.

Girl Scout cookies are totally overrated. Thin Mints are okay, but I could eat a box of them in about thirty seconds and not be satisfied at all. The Tagalongs are total bullshit. The coconut ones: gross. Can't remember the other ones. Maybe a lot of people like Girl Scout Cookies. I find them creepy.

One good thing came of them though, when I was a sophomore in high school, probably fourteen turning fifteen, there was a really cute girl in my Latin class, but I hadn't had the guts to talk to her all year. Then, sometime in March, she was selling Girl Scout Cookies at school (too old?) so I ordered a box of Thin Mints. The box of cookies arrived on my birthday, and I convinced  her to give them to me as a birthday present. After that we started dating, I actually don't remember how, and now I'm not even sure what her name was, because my friends and I referred to her as "cookie girl" from then on.

Apparently fortune cookies were invented by Chinese soldiers who were fighting Mongolians, because the Mongolians didn't like cookies, so they coordinated the date for an uprising using notes hidden inside cookies, or moon cakes was what they had. The cookies helped coordinate the uprising, which was successful, and led to the Ming Dynasty. However, apparently there aren't fortune cookies in China anymore, and this New York Times writer thinks they were actually invented in Japan. There is also some debate about how fortune cookies made it to America. One claim is that Makota Hagiwara brought them to LA in the early 1900s, before moving them to San Francisco, displaying at them at a convention in 1915. Another account is that David Jung, a cantonese immigrat in LA, started making cookies with slips of paper inside around 1920, and gave them to poor and homeless people, after writing words of encouragement on the paper.  I don't have any particular attachment to fortune cookies, but I like them.   Cookies were originally invented to test oven temperatures before they invented thermostats. The Persians that I mentioned before had sweet cakes, because they had sugar while Europe only had honey. Only wealthy people got sweet cakes.  In England they called them biscuits because they're lame. So it was English and Dutch immigrants that brought the cookie to America in the 1600s.  America is obviously where the cookie really found its place. The Dutch koekje developed into "cookie" in New York City.  Until the early twentieth century, cookies were baked at home as special treats because of the high cost of sugar and amount of labor.  Then sugar and flour became cheap and other leavening chemicals were invented, like baking soda, which, along with the introduction of modern ovens and thermostats, lead to a cookie explosion in the early twentieth century. 

There are lots of varieties of cookies, including bar cookies, drop cookies, molded cookies, no-bake cookies, pressed cookies, refrigerator (or ice-box) cookies, rolled cookies, sandwich cookies, fried cookies... there are probably more. 

What's great about cookies is that mass produced corporate versions of cookies actually suck. Oreos, Chips Ahoy!, Girl Scout Cookies, Fig Newtons, they're all terrible. There are a few exceptions, like Animal Crackers, but for the most part I would never pay money for any one of those awful imitations. 

In college I used to get those tubes of cookie dough, but I would always just eat the cookie dough straight from the thing, because the actual cookies they make totally suck.  They'll never come close to my Mom's cookies, or probably anyone's Mom's cookies.

Owen Roberts is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Brooklyn, NY. He occasionally criticizes comics here and posts pictures that he takes on his cell phone here. He last wrote in these pages about literary forgery and Boy Meets World.