Our Cookie Heritage

Cookies have been with us since the beginning of recorded history. Just like cakes and pastries, cookies and crackers are the descendants of the earliest foods cooked by humans--a rather unappetizing mixture of grain, water and paste that was baked on hot stones by Neolithic farmers over 10,000 years ago. While the resulting product provided sustinance for those who consumed it, it was not particularly tasty.

Crackers became the world's first convenience food--hardtack, for example, proved a protable food that had a long storage life and was perfect for traveling. For centuries, a ship's biscuit, an iron-like cracker, was aboard any ship that left port because it could last for months, even years under the right conditions. The biscuit consisted of a flour paste that was cooked twice to dry it out. In fact, the word "biscuit" comes from the Old French "biscoit," which means "twice cooked."

Ancient Middle Eastearn bakers developed the cookie that we've come to know today. They used eggs, butter and cream to lighten the flour paste mixtures, then sweetened them with fruit, honey and, later during the Middle Ages, sugar.

As early as the 7th century A.D., citizens of the Persian empire were enjoying cakes and pastries both large and small. Cookie recipes and cooking techniques from the Middle East gradually spread to Europe with the Muslim invasion of Spain, the Crusades and the spice trade. By the end of the 14th century, the French were purchasing and eating little filled wafers on the streets of Paris, Renaissance cookbooks included recipes for cookies and by the 17th century, cookies were commonplace.

The Dutch gave us the word for cookie--koeptji or koekje, which means "small cake." In 1627, the Dutch introduced holiday cookies to the North American continent through their early settlements in the New World. Cookie recipes were also included in the first cookbook published in North America in 1796. "One recipe, called Another Christmas Cookey, called for three pounds of flour, a tea cup of fine powdered coriander seed, one pound of butter and 3 tea spoonfuls of pearl ash dissolved in a tea cup of milk," according to a recent article that appeared in a Better Homes and Gardens special publication. Like most early cookies, they achieved their shape by rolling and cutting.

Although much of our cookie baking is done at Christmas time, cookies were made for celebrations even before Christmas became a holiday. For example, the Germans baked springerle (anise-scented cookies) and the Scottish included shortbread in ancient midwinter pagan festivals. When Pope Julius declared December 25 as Christmas in 350 A.D., cookies became part of that holiday's tradition. By the 1500s, Christmas cookies were the rage all over Europe.

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