Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Cookies
Cookies
INTRODUCTION:
Cookies
Pastries (pies, tarts, puff pastry)
Cakes
Quick bread ( biscuits, pizza, muffins,
Bread (other yeast-raised products)
HISTORY OF COOKIES
The cookie, such a small little treat, but
surprisingly has a very long history and is loved by
millions. Did you ever how the first cookie came to
be and what they look like in different cultures? Here
is a Brief History of the Cookie.
The actual definition of a cookie is pretty wide.
A cookie is any flour-based sweet cake that can easily
be held in your hand. Cookies can either be crisp or
soft, thick or thin.
The Origin of the Cookie
The first cookies are thought to be test cakes
bakers used to test the oven temperature. They
date back as early as 7th Century A.D. Persia which
is now Iran. They were one of the first countries to
grow and harvest sugar cane.
With war and exploration eventually sugar was
introduced to the Mediterranean area and
European countries and so were cookies. And by
the end of the 14th century, cookies were common
place in European cities. The earliest cooking
books from the Renaissance were chockful of
cookie recipes.
One popular type of cookie in Elizabethan England
was a square short-cookie made with egg yolks
and spices and baked on parchment paper.
After the Industrial Revolution, improvements in
technology led to more variety of cookies be
available commercially. The base for all cookies
were the same though: wheat flour, sugar and fats
like butter and oil.
Coming to America
Of course when the Europeans arrived in the
Americas, they brought their cookie recipes with
them. Soon they adapted the old recipes to fit the
New World. American butter cookies are a close
relative to the English teacake and the Scottish
shortbread.
In the Southern colonies, every housewife knew
how to bake tea cakes that had no extra flavoring
except butter and sometimes a couple drops of rose
water.
The first American cookies that showed up in cook
books had creative names like Jumbles, Plunkets and
Cry Babies which gave no clue to what was inside the
cookie. As the expansion of technology grew in the
United States, new ingredients started to show up in
cookie recipes. For instance with the railroad, more
people could purchase fruits and nuts like coconuts
and oranges. Even cereal started showing up in
cookie recipes after the Kellogg brothers invented
cornflakes in the late 1800s. Then when electric
refrigerators became available in the 1930s, icebox
cookies also became popular.
Here are some of the most popular types of
cookies from around the world.
Animal Crackers originally came from England to
the United States and were first just called
“Animals”. Then in the late 1800s, manufacturers
in the United States began making them. Then
with the rise of P.T. Barnum and his circus,
“Animals” became “Animal Crackers” and that is
when you started to see the still familiar square box
with a circus cage on it and a handle for easy
carrying.
ANZAC BAKERY are Australia’s National Biscuit,
but they started out as a hardtack biscuit for the
Australian army. Because of their longer shelf life,
these biscuits were used as a substitute for bread.
Biscotti is the general term in Italian for cookies.
The word actually means “twice cooked”. For these
cookies, the dough is shaped into logs and baked
until they are a golden brown color. Then the logs
are sliced into individual cookies and baked again.
Other countries have their own version of the
Biscotti. The Dutch call theirs a rusk cookie and in
Germany it is the zwieback
The Chocolate Chip Cookie actually was invented by
mistake by Ruth Graves Wakefield in 1937 in
Massachusetts. She ran the Toll House Restaurant
and would often bake cookies for her guests. On the
day in question, she was making “Butter Drop Do”
cookies when she realized she had run out of baker’s
chocolate. She used a bar of semisweet chocolate
instead expecting it to melt into the dough but
instead the pieces of chocolate kept their shape. And
that was the first bath of chocolate chip cookies. She
originally called the cookies, “The Toll House Crunch
Cookies”.
In 1939, Betty Crocker mentioned the cookie on her
radio series on “Famous Foods From Famous Eating
Places” and soon people everywhere were asking for
the chocolate chip cookie. Ruth eventually made an
agreement with the Nestle company that allowed
them to print the recipe on the back wrapper of their
Semi-Sweet Chocolate Bar and the rest is history.
In 1997, the chocolate chip cookie became of the
official cookie of the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts.
The origin of the Fig Newton is still up for debate.
One claim is that the jam-filled cookies were
invented by a Philadelphia inventor named James
Henry Mitchell in 1891 when he created the
machine that allows the cookies to be filled with
jam. The machine was patented in January of 1892
and the cookies got its name from the town of
Newton, Massachusetts.
Ladyfingers date back to 11th century France and
were popular among the royalty of Europe. In the
early 1900s, they also became popular in the
United States and Specialty Bakers Inc. in
Marysville, Pennsylvania became known as “The
Lady Finger Specialist”.
The Nazareth Sugar Cookie, also known as the
Amish Sugar Cookies, probably has origins in
Germany, but was perfected in the Nazareth area of
Pennsylvania by German Protestants that settled
there in the 1700s. The cookie is actually shaped
like a Keystone, the state’s symbol.
https://dodocookiedough.com/a-brief-history-of-
the-cookie/
TYPES OF COOKIES
1. Dropped cookies-
Cookies that are made by dropping a spoonful of
batter onto a baking pan are called drop cookies. The
batter for these types of cookies is usually soft, but
stiff enough to hold their shape when dropped onto
the pan. While cooking, the batter will spread out
and flatten to form the popular circle cookie shape.
The word cookie is commonly used in the United
States and Canada, but these sweet treats are often
referred to as biscuits in the United Kingdom and
some other English-speaking countries.
Dropped cookies- These are made by dropping the
dough from a teaspoon into the cookie sheet. Shapes
of dropped cookies are quite irregular and uneven.
2. Molded cookies -Cookies made by shaping dough
by hand into small balls, logs, and other shapes. Also
called hand-formed cookie.
3. Rolled cookies- are a popular variety of
holiday cookie, as they can be molded into various
holiday-themed shapes using cookie cutters. When
the dough for the rolled cookies is rolled out on
the counter, be sure to place wax paper or a layer of
flour down first to prevent it from sticking. It is
important to roll the dough so it is thin and flat ...
Molded cookies – These are formed by rolling a small
amount of dough with hands and arranging it on
cookie sheet. Almost all molded cookies are round in
shape.