Cake biscuits: Cookies

History

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.

Cookies appear to have their origins in 7th century AD Persia, shortly after the use of sugar became relatively common in the region. They spread to Europe through the Muslim conquest of Spain. By the 14th century, they were common in all levels of society throughout Europe, from royal cuisine to street vendors.

With global travel becoming widespread at that time, cookies made a natural travel companion, a modernized equivalent of the travel cakes used throughout history. One of the most popular early cookies, which traveled especially well and became known on every continent by similar names, was the jumble, a relatively hard cookie made largely from nuts, sweetener, and water.

Cookies came to America through the Dutch in New Amsterdam in the late 1620s. The Dutch word "koekje" was Anglicized to "cookie" or cooky. The earliest reference to cookies in America is in 1703, when "The Dutch in New York provided...'in 1703...at a funeral 800 cookies..."

The most common modern cookie, given its style by the creaming of butter and sugar, was not common until the 18th century.

Some types of cookies

1. Benne Wafer

Benne Wafers are thin, crispy cookies made of toasted sesame and the taste is reminiscent of almond or caramel. The dessert has been a specialty of South Carolina's Low Country since Colonial times after being brought to the colonies from East Africa. "Benne" is the Bantu word for "sesame," and the seeds were planted throughout the south.

2. Black And White Cookie

The black and white cookie is synonymous with New York City. The cookies have a dry, vanilla cookie base topped with bisected chocolate and vanilla fondant icing. They are sold in bakeries and delis all over the city and are technically not cookies at all, but drop-cakes -- the batter is like that of a cupcake, but with extra flour, so it doesn't run everywhere when dollops are dropped onto a baking sheet.

3. Chocolate Chip Cookie

Chocolate chip cookies are the classic drop cookies. Though originally made with semisweet chocolate chips, these cookies can be reimagined with milk chocolate, white chocolate, strawberry, butterscotch, etc.

Creation of the chocolate chip cookie can actually be attributed to one woman -- Ruth Graves Wakefield. She was a dietitian and educator at Framingham State Normal School Department of Household Arts, where she lectured about foods in the 1920s. In 1930, she and her husband Kenneth Wakefield bought a tourist lodge in Whitman, Massachusetts. They named their business the Toll House Inn, Ruth cooked all the meals and the couple gained local fame.

She invented the chocolate chip cookie in 1938 by chopping a Nestle semi-sweet chocolate bar into small bits and adding them to a batch of cookies. Today, Toll House cookies are considered the classic American chocolate chip cookies.

4. Fortune Cookie

Fortune cookies are crisp, sugar cookies made from flour, sugar, vanilla and sesame seed oil, and are most often found thrown into the bottom of your Chinese takeout bag. But it wasn't actually created in China.

The modern-day fortune cookies were invented in San Francisco by Japanese immigrant Makoto Hagiwara in the late 1890s or early 1900s. The cookies were popular with Japanese-Americans until around World War II, when many people of Japanese descent were placed in internment camps. This gave Chinese manufacturers an opportunity to take over, and they took it.

5. Fried Cookie

Fried cookies are one of the eight basic types of cookies, along with bar cookies, drop cookies, molded cookies, pressed cookies, refrigerator cookies, rolled cookies and sandwich cookies. They are essentially just fried dough coated in sugar. Some of the most popular fried cookies are Jewish/Polish krusczyki, Italian zeppole, and Mexican churros. All are light, airy and sweet.

6. Gingerbread Cookie

Gingersnaps are flat, circular cookies that get their name from the snapping sound they make when these crispy treats are eaten. Because they contain so much ginger, they tend to be spicier than their gingerbread cousins. The cookies were popular throughout England and Germany and colonial settlers brought them over to the Americas.

7. Macaroons

Macaroons are colorful little round cookies made of flour, sugar and egg whites. They're popular in Europe, particularly France, and were invented in Italy in 1533 by chef Catherine de Medicis, whose husband later became King Henry II of France.

The cookies have undergone a few transformations throughout the centuries -- the original macaroons were made of almond powder and their colors were much more subdued than today's. It wasn't until the 20th century when macaroons took on the form we know now, of two cookie halves stuck together with a cream filling.

8. Molasses Cookie

Like chocolate chip cookies, molasses cookies are drop cookies. They're very simple to make and sweetened with molasses and brown sugar acting as sweeteners, and you can also add some flavor with ginger or cinnamon. They can be hard like gingersnaps or soft and chewy, depending on the recipe.

9. Oatmeal Cookie

Oatmeal cookies are drop cookies that can be made simply with oatmeal or embellished with raisins and nuts. One of the first recipes for oatmeal cookies was documented in 1896 by culinary expert Fannie Merritt Farmer in her book Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, according to Mother Nature Network. These cookies evolved from the oatmeal cakes that were popular throughout the United Kingdom.

10. Peanut Butter Cookie

Peanut butter cookies were developed in the 1910s as George Washington Carver was promoting the peanut and its many uses as a replacement for the cotton crop. In his 1916 publication, How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing it for Human Consumption, he included three cookie recipes that contained the coveted nut. According to Punchbowl, the first peanut butter cookie recipe was published in 1932 by the Schenectady Gazette, which was the first to not only use peanut butter in cookies but to promote the now-iconic criss-cross fork marks on top.

11. Sandwich Cookie

One of the eight types of cookies, sandwich cookies are two cookies fused together with a filling such as frosting, jam, peanut butter, ice cream or marshmallows. By far, the most popular sandwich cookies are Oreos.