The American Cookie Story

by Nancy Baggett

Early Cookies: Hard Gingerbread—

Unleavened Cookies

Macaroons—Leavened with Egg Whites

Marguerites—Leavened with Egg Whites

New Year’s Cakes, Springerle-- Unleavened

Jumbals, Jumbles

America’s First Cookbook

First American “Cookey”

Amelia Simmons, American Cookery, 1796Another Christmas CookeyTo three pound flour, sprinkle a tea cup of fine

powdered coriander seed, rub in one pound butter, and one and half pound sugar, dissolve three tea spoonfuls of pearl ash in a tea cup of milk, kneed all together well, roll three quarters of an inch thick, and cut or stamp into shape and size you please, bake slowly fifteen or twenty minutes; tho' hard and dry at first, if put into an earthern pot, and dry cellar, or damp room, they will be finer, softer and better when six months old.

Early Chemical Leavenings

Pearlash--Crude potassium carbonate, called, when purified by recrystalization, pearlash. Saleratus--Originally potassium bicarbonate, it began to replace the pearlash in cookbooks in the early 1850's. As sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) became more common, potassium bicarbonate was discontinued. However, some people continued to call soda 'saleratus' for several more decades.

Chemical Leavenings:Baking Soda

• Founded 1846. Dr. Austin Church and his brother-in-law John E. Dwight, who had been making and packaging baking soda in Dwight's kitchen. In 1867, two sons of Church formed Church & Co. The Arm & Hammer trademark dates from that year; Church & Co. acquired a spice and mustard business, Vulcan Spice Mills, that used an arm and hammer logo.

Chemical Leavenings: Baking Soda

Chemical Leavenings:Baking Powder

Chemical Leavenings:Baking Powder

Pennsylvania Dutch Soft Sugar Cakes

Early Chocolate Maker:Baker’s Rules

Early Chocolate Makers

First Chocolate Cookie

CHOCOLATE MACAROONS. Put a quarter of a pound of chocolate on a time-plate over a coal fire, and when it is dissolved pour it on a plate; put to it a spoonful or two of sweet almond paste, made as for macaroons, stir it in well, and then pour it upon the remainder of the almond paste, in which you have mixed a teaspoonful of powdered cinnamon or vanilla, or both: beat them together well in a mortar, lay them on paper, and bake them for three-quarters of an hour in a moderate oven.

• From: The Cook’s Own Book (Boston,1832), by Mrs. N. K. M. Lee, copied from Cook’s Dictionary and Housekeeper’s Directory, by Richard Dolby.

Chocolate Cookies

Food Icons:The Quaker Oats Man

One of the earliest American food icons: He was familiar to American consumers by 1893.

First Oatmeal Cookie in America

OATMEAL SNAPS (SCOTCH PERKINS)

16 lbs flour6 ½ lbs oatmeal4 lbs sugar4 lbs lard¾ lb soda3 oz ammonial lb allspice6 ½ qts molassesWash on the top with egg; cut small and pan loosely, as

they spread a great deal.

The Complete Bread, Cake and Cracker Baker, 1881

Modern Oatmeal Cookies

Peanut Butter

Modern Peanut Butter Cookies

The 1933 Pillsbury's Balanced Recipes contains a Peanut Butter Balls recipe with instructions to roll the dough into balls and press them down with the tines of a fork.

Turn of the CenturyChocolate Makers

Breakthrough! Brownies

Lowney’s Brownies

• Lowney’s Brownies• ½ cup butter• 1 cup sugar• 2 squares Lowney’s

Premium Chocolate• 2 eggs • ½ cup nut meats• ½ cup flour• ¼ teaspoon salt• Cream butter, add

remaining ingredients, spread on buttered sheets, and bake 10 to fifteen minutes. Cut in squares as soon as teaken from oven.

• Lowney’s Cookbook, 1907, The Walter M. Lowney Co.

Commercial Cookies on the American Scene

Modern America’s Favorite:

The Chocolate Chip Cookie

Nestle’s Chocolate Chip Cookies1941 Ads

“Chocolafication” of the American Cookie

Repertoire

Cookie Icon:Ernie the Keebler Elf

• Created in 1968 by the Chicago-based Leo Burnett Co., for Keebler, Ernie and his elf friends espoused the "uncommonly good” cookies from the Hollow Tree Bakery.

Cookies: The American Story

THE END