pregnancy
little ones
BY ALICIA RESNIK
That’s How The
Cookie Crumbles!
Do you like cookies? Chocolate chip or peanut-butter?
Oatmeal-raisin or a Snickerdoodle? I bet you’d be surprised to
learn that cookies were an unintentional creation!
T
he first cookie-type treat dates back to 7th
century Persia (now called Iran). Persia was
one of the first countries to cultivate sugar and
it quickly became a common ingredient in Medieval
Arabian cuisine. Arabian cooks made small sugar cakes
and pastries that they flavored with nuts and spices.
The use of sugar in cooking spread to Europe in
three ways – along with the Moors when they invaded
Spain in 711, then with the Crusades, and with the
emerging Spice Trade. During the Middle
Ages (from the 5th to the 15th century)
European cooks were using sugar in
their cake recipes. To test the tem-
perature of their stoves, cooks
dropped spoonfuls of cake
batter on their stove tops. If
the batter cooked, the oven
was hot enough for baking.
Cooks called these little
cake batter tests koekje (pro-
nounced cooky, and meaning
little cake in Dutch). The
cookie was created!
By the 14th century people all over Europe were
enjoying sweet handheld treats. Cookies were delicious!
They were durable and travelled well. They were even
brought aboard the Mayflower when it sailed from Eng-
land to America in 1620. In fact, sailors favored a type
of cookie called hard-tack because it was portable and
stayed fresh for long periods of time. Hard-tack could
last on voyages of months and even years!
English, Scotch and Dutch immigrants are cred-
ited with introducing cookies to America. These early
cookies had funny names like gemmels, plunkets,
cry-babies and jumbles. The first jumble cookie
was just that – a mixture of ingredients
that cooks had on hand such as flour,
sugar, vanilla, butter, eggs and nuts.
They flavored them with aniseed,
coriander, caraway seeds, rosewater,
cloves, mace and even saffron. Like
hard-tack, these early cookies were
dense and hard. They could last for
almost a year without getting stale!
Early cooks shaped these jumbles
into rings and knots to make them
easy to carry, break and eat. By the
18th century, jumbles were rolled cook-
ies that were baked. These treats closely
resemble a popular cookie today –
the sugar cookie.
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