History of Cookies
The first cookies were created by accident Cooks used a small amount of cake batter to test their oven temperature betore baking a large cake, The earliest cookie-style cakes are thought to date back to seventh-century Persia. Persia was one of the first countries to cultivate sugar. The word cookie originally came from the Dutch keok]e, meaning “little cake”. Dutch first popularized cookies in the United States. The British incorporated them in the 19th century in their daily tea service and calling them biscuits or sweet buns, as they do in Scotland.
Sometime in the 1930s, a Massachusetts Innkeeper ran out ot nuts vvhlle making cookies. she substltuted a bar of baking chocolate, breaking It Into pieces and adding the chunks of chocolate to the flour, butter, and brown sugar dough. The Toll House Cookie was then Invented and became a big hit. Ruth Wakefield was credited with inventing the chocolate chip cookie, an American Classic. Cookies are made with sweet dough or batter, baked in single-sized servings and eaten out-of-hand. Perfect for snacking or as dessert, cookles are consumed In 95. ercent ot u. s. households. Americans alone consume over 2 billion cookies a year or 300 cookies for each person annually. cookies are most often classified by method of preparation – drop, molded, pressed, refrigerated, bar and rolled. Their dominant ingredient, such as nut cookies, fruit cookies or chocolate cookies, can also classify them. Whether gourmet, soft or bite-sized cookies, new categories are always cropping up as the American appetite for cookies contlnues to grow. A drop cookle Is made by dropplng spoontuls ot dough onto a baking sheet.
Bar cookies are created when a batter or soft dough Is spooned Into a shallow pan, then baked, cooled and cut into bars. Hand-formed cookies are made by shaping dough by hand into small balls, logs, crescents and other shapes. Pressed cookies are formed by pressing dough through a cookie press to form fancy shapes and designs. Refrigerator cookies are made by shaping the dough into a log, which is retrigerated until firm, then sliced and baked. Rolled cookies begin by using a rolling pln to roll the dough out flat; then It Is cut Into decorative shapes with cookie cutters r d pointed knife.
Other cookies, such as the German springerle, are formed by Imprinting designs on the dough, either by rolling a special decoratively carved rolling pin over it or by pressing the dough into a carved cookie mold. The Southern colonial housewife took great pride in her cookies, almost always called simply “tea cakes. ” These were otten flavored with nothing more than the finest butter, sometimes with the addltlon of a few drops of rose water. In earlier American cookbooks, cookies were given no space of their own but were listed at the end of the cake chapter.
