Is there a perfect cookie that no one can resist biting into? I guess I could just as well ask if there is another perfect human being who can please everybody. Cookies too can have their own personalities that speak of where they came from and have pedigrees that prove their noble lineage. It is not unusual to see families guarding secret cookie recipes for generations. They have recipes that their great great grandmothers have created. Many of them have conserved the original recipes and up to this day baked cookies using ingredients called for in the original hundred of years old cookie recipes. People around the world also have their own venerable cookie recipes. In Spain for example, they have “galletas” and from Italy we get the familiar “biscotti”. Germany has “keks” and the English call them “biscuits”.
Cookie historians describe the first cookies in history as “test cakes”. Bakers during that time used a little amount of what was to be baked as whole cakes to test if the temperature of the oven is just about right. Cookies today come in many sweet varieties. They have been created in response to millions of sweet toothed cookie lovers around the globe. You can think of a possible cookie ingredient and chances are somebody somewhere around the world has created a version using that ingredient. From chocolates to raspberries to any of the exotic fruits known to us, there is bound to be a cookie based on it.
In the United States, the first chocolate cookies are said to be made by Ruth Graves Wakefield in her Whitman, Massachusetts Toll House Restaurant in 1937. It was by a very fortuitous event that she was invented this cookie. She found a bar of semisweet chocolate and used it as a substitute ingredient for baker’s chocolate called for in the recipe she was about to bake. She chopped the chocolate and mixed the chocolate chunks into the dough. The result was what she called the “Toll House Crunch Cookies.” In 1939, Betty Crocker used this cookie in her radio program and catapulted the cookie into national prominence. Stories about Ruth and the Nestle Company circulated saying that they had an agreement where the company will supply Ruth with all the chocolate she needs for baking her famous toll house cookies as long as she lived. The Nestle Company got all the legal rights to use the Toll House trademark but eventually lost it, which allowed name to be used today as a descriptive term for cookies.
The Fig Newton Cookies have a rather controversial origin as there are two camps vying for the honors of being their inventor. The first fig Newton cookies were made in 1891 as asserted by the Nabisco Company. According to them, it was James Henry Mitchell who invented the machine that made this cookie. Another story says that it was C.M. Roser who sold his cookie and candy business that made these famous cookies to Nabisco. This claim however has not been verified and no proofs have been presented to back up the claim.
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