History of Cookies
from http://www.thenibble.com/

Cookies are small, sweet, flat, dry cakes—single-serving finger food. They are generally flour based, but they can be flourless—made from egg whites and/or almonds like macaroons, for example—or made from gluten-free flour, like rice flour. Cookies can be soft, chewy or crisp. They can be big or small, plain or fancy. They can be simple—butter and sugar—or complex, with a multitude of ingredients, or fashioned into cookie sandwiches, two layers and filling. But they started out long ago, not as a treat or a comfort food, but as an oven regulator!

There are two issues to deal with when discussing the history of cookies. The word "cookie" and the origin of the food.

Origin of Cookies, the Food

"Cookies," the food, 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 human, in this case, a 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 sustenance for those who consumed it, it was not particularly tasty given today's standards.

In Rome around the 3rd century B.C. they made baked grain products called 'bis coctum' meaning twice baked. This biscuit, what we’d now call a rusk, was essentially bread which was re-baked to make it crisp. It kept for longer than plain bread, and was useful for travellers and soldiers’ rations. The Roman 'bis coctum' was not sweet, it had no sugar added. 'Bis coctum' is the origin of the word 'biscuit,' which is a flakey quick bread in the U.S., but in England a biscuit is what in the U.S. would be called a cookie or cracker.

Medieval and Renaissance Biscuits

From the web site, How Sweet It Was: Cane Sugar from the Ancient World to the Elizabethian Period, by Brandy and Courtney Powers:

In 510 BC, hungry soldiers of the Emperor Darius were near the river Indus, when they discovered some "reeds which produce honey without bees." Evidently this early contact with the Asian sources of sugar cane made no great impression, so it was left to be re-discovered in 327 BC by Alexander the Great, who spread it's culture through Persia and introduced it in the Mediterranean. This was the beginning of one of the best documented products of the Middle Ages.

Europeans had always used honey as a sweetener; sugar came much later. According to historians, sugar originated either in the lowlands of Bengal or elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Sugar was brought to Persia and cultivated there by the 6th century, spreading to the eastern Mediterranean. After the rise of Islam, the Arabs entered Persia in the 8th century and were introduced to the age-old process of sugar produced from cane, adopting and further developing these techniques. With the Muslim invasion of Iberia (Spain) in the 8th century, followed by the Crusades (1095 to 1291) and the developing spice trade, the cooking techniques and ingredients of Arabia spread to Northern Europe along with cookie recipes.

The earliest cookie-style cakes are thought to date back to 7th century Persia A.D. (now Iran), one of the first countries to cultivate sugar (luxurious cakes and pastries in large and small versions were well known in the Persian empire). Small sweet cakes that are similar to our cookies today (Lavish cakes were well-known in the Persian Empire) probably originated around India or Persia around the 7th century, and Ancient Middle Eastern 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.

By the 14th century, the word biscuit had appeared in English, and the definition was broadening. Twice-baked biscuits were still popular, both savoury and sweet. But other forms, related to pancakes, were also becoming more common. Wafers (made with a wafer iron) were one of the longest-lasting medieval biscuits, made of a sweetened batter which was cooked over a fire and could be moulded or rolled as technology improved. These biscuits weren’t just functional, but pleasurable as well. They were often eaten at the end of the meal (often with hippocras) as a digestive, a role which biscuits would continue to play until the 20th century.

Very few recipes for these dainty snacks exist prior to the 16th century. There are references to shortbread dating back to the 12th century but the majority of cookie recipes show up in European cookbooks in the 16th century when sugar was easily available and prices were being to go down. In the Renaissance and later periods, snack foods like this were not called cookies, but biscotti, biskets, bisketellos, rusks, spritzkuchen, wafers, jambals, drops, puffins, cracknels, morsels, and many other names. Many of these early recipes are still being made today with only minor modifications.

The earliest recognizable recipe for a cookie is Ciambella de Monaco from Libro de Cucina, 1390, which is an ancestor to our Vanilla Wafers. Ciambelli were made from only flour, sugar, and eggs. Lots of eggs by today's standard. In fact one recipe calls for 20 eggs! This makes sense because Medieval cooks needed to preserve foods when they were plentiful, so they made dried cakes from eggs that could be saved for up to a year without spoiling. The wafers could also be crushed to make a kind of sweetened, protein powder to add to pies, stews, gravy, pudding, and other dishes. Bartolomeo Scappi, head Cook to the Pope (1570) includes crushed mustaccolli (a Milanese biscuit) in dozens of recipes.

1596 - From the 1596 cookbook called Goode Huswife's Jewel by Thomas Dawson, one of the earliest cookery books for the growing middle classes in Elizabethan England. This is a square short-cookie enriched with egg yolks and spices, baked on parchment paper.

To make Fine Cakes.- Take fine flowre and good Damaske water you must have no other liqeur but that, then take sweet butter, two or three yolkes of eggs and a good quantity of Suger, and a few cloves, and mace, as your Cookes mouth shall serve him, and a lyttle saffron, and a little Gods good about a spoonful if you put in too much they shall arise, cutte them in squares lyke unto trenchers, and pricke them well, and let your oven be well swept and lay them uppon papers and so set them into the oven. Do not burne them if they be three or foure days olde they bee the better.

Renaissance cookbooks included recipes for cookies and by the end of the 14th century, the French were purchasing and eating little filled wafers on the streets of Paris.

The Importance of Sugar - Cookies become commonplace

Biscuits started to change in the late 16th and 17th century. Prior to then, sugar had been very expensive, eaten only by the very rich, and imported from the near east. By the 1660s, Britain had colonised the West Indies, and a very dark part of world history had begun. Britain was not the only European country to participate in the slave trade, but it was the most significant. It implemented the plantation system in the West Indies and America, and built an empire of sugar based on human misery. In Britain itself, the price of sugar fell, and the foods which used it became cheaper and more accessible. The types of biscuits (and cake) grew, and many more people started to consume them, on many different occasions.

Improved access to ingredients was not the only reason for a biscuit boom in the 17th century. Cooking technology was changing too, and food was undergoing a quiet revolution as Italian and then French influences came to bear. The old guild system was breaking down, and, try as they might, the bakers’ guilds could not stop people baking biscuits at home.

New types of biscuit found their way into recipe books: boiled and then baked, both jumbels and cracknels were knotted into intricate shapes. Macaroons melded meringues with nuts and took advantage of the magical properties of a stiff egg foam. Rice cakes showcased the usefulness of flours beyond the standard wheaten flour, while in Germany in particular, gingerbreads became a true mark of regional identity. There was a lot of crossover between breads and cakes. One popular recipes was for wiggs, which were neither one nor the other, and were both eaten for breakfast, and dunked into chocolate as an afternoon snack.

Chocolate was one among three new beverages to be introduced in the 17th century. Coffee and tea also came into Britain, and would play a role in the history of biscuits. Until the 18th century biscuits were still mainly eaten as part of the dessert course, along with some casual nibbling. But as tea became entrenched in the British social scene, biscuits became an integral part of a new ritual, which would eventually become known as afternoon tea.

By the 19th century, biscuits were everywhere. They were easy to make at home, and there was a type for every occasion. The middle and upper classes, who sat down to meals of several courses, ate them for dessert, which also consisted of ice cream, fruit and nuts. This was the time for flavoured mini-meringues and macaroons, wine biscuits (intended to accompany wine), and a type of biscuit which was bewilderingly difficult to define: the petit four.

Petit four means ‘small oven’, and was the name given to tiny, delicate biscuits cooked in a low oven after things needing a higher temperature had been removed. They were usually cut into intricate shapes. They were sometimes coloured, always decorated, and could be flavoured with all sorts of things. They were a classic dessert biscuit.

By the 17th century, cookies were commonplace.

Cookies in America

The first American cookies were originally brought to this country by the English, Scotch, and Dutch immigrants. Our simple "butter cookies" strongly resemble the English tea cakes and the Scotch shortbread. In 1627, the Dutch introduced holiday cookies to the North American continent. Yesteryear's cookbooks yield countless receipts for traditional delights as Snickerdoodles, raisin-filled Hermits, Sand Tarts, and Jumbles, Southern-style Tea Cakes, and a myriad of sweet delicacies inspired by the Pennsylvania Dutch Mennonites, Amish, and Moravian communities. The Southern colonial housewife took great pride in her cookies, almost always called simply "tea cakes." These were often flavored with nothing more than the finest butter, sometimes with the addition of a few drops of rose water.

Cookie recipes were also included in the first cookbook published in North America in 1796. In earlier American cookbooks, cookies were given no space of their own but were listed at the end of the cake chapter. They were called by such names as Jumbles, Plunkets, and Cry Babies. The names were extremely puzzling and whimsical. "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 an article that appeared in a Better Homes and Gardens special publication. Like most early cookies, they achieved their shape by rolling and cutting.

During the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, most cookies were baked at home as special treats, both because of the amount of labor and the high cost of sugar. Recipes for jumbles, macaroons and gingerbread are found in early cookbooks.

During the 19th century, affordable sugar and flour, plus the introduction of chemical raising agents such as bicarbonate of soda (baking soda), led to the development of other types of cookie recipes. Another explosion of cookie recipes took place in the early 1900s, not surprisingly paralleling the introduction of modern ovens with thermostats. The famous chocolate chip cookie was not to appear until 1930. Sometime in the 1930s, so the story goes, a Massachusetts innkeeper, Ruth Wakefield, ran out of nuts while making cookies. Therefore, she substituted a bar of baking chocolate, breaking it into pieces and adding the chunks of chocolate to the flour, butter and brown sugar dough. The Toll House Cookie, so named after the inn in which it was served, was a hit.

American cookies, like Americans themselves, have been a melting pot of cookie tastes and styles originating with the colonialists and thriving on waves of immigrant culinary contributions. Spice cookies, soft raisin cookies, shortbread, brown sugar-laced oatmeal, molasses and ginger drop cookies were delectably familiar.

The British took a liking to them in the 19th century, incorporating them into their daily tea service and calling them biscuits or sweet buns, as they do in Scotland.

The railroad's expansion in America in the early 1800s gave cooks access to coconuts from the South. Later in the century, oranges from the West were included in many recipes. Around the turn of the century, the Kellogg brothers in Michigan invented cornflakes and cookies were made with cereal products. In the 1930s, with the advent of electric refrigerators, icebox cookies reached new heights of popularity. Today there are hundreds upon hundreds of cookie recipes in the United States. No one book could hold the recipes for all of the various types of cookies.

In 1902 N.B.C. (Nabisco) introduced Barnum's Animal Crackers in the famous decorative box resembling a circus cage filled with animals. In 1912 both Lorna Doones and Oreos were created, the latter eventually becoming the world's best-selling cookie.

Origin of the Word "Cookie"

The Dutch gave us the word for cookie--koeptji or koekje, which means "small cake." In the Netherlands, cooks used a small amount of cake batter to test their oven temperature before baking a large cake (remember, early ovens didn’t have thermostats like ours do, and were fueled by burning wood). These little test cakes were called "koekje", meaning "little cake" in Dutch.

English and Dutch immigrants brought the cookie to America in the 1600s. The Dutch used the word koekje, while the English primarily referred to cookies as small cakes, seed biscuits, or tea cakes, or by specific names, such as jumble (a spiced butter cookie) or macaroon. By the early 1700s, koekje had evolved to cookie or cookey, and was well-entrenched in New York City, then the nation’s capital—a factor that resulted in widespread use of the term.

According to The Oxford Companion to Food, the term “cookie” first appeared in print around 1703. In earlier American cookbooks, cookies were given no space of their own but were listed at the end of the cake chapter. They were called by such names as "Jumbles," "Plunkets," and "Cry Babies." The names were extremely puzzling and whimsical.

Each language has its own word for cookie. In The Netherlands, the little test cake was called a koekje, “little cake” in Dutch (a cake is koek). The concept evolved to small, individual portions, which were baked to create the dry, hard-textured cookies we know today. The British word for cookie, "biscuit," comes from the Latin bis coctum, meaning “twice baked” (also the origin of the Italian biscotti). In Spain they're galletas, Germans and Austrians call them kekse (keks is singular), in Italy they're biscotti and so on. In wide parts of Germany both kekse and plätzchen are used and there is a slight difference between them. "Kekse" are plainer cookies while "Plätzchen" are a little bit more "sophisticated" (chocolate cover, decoration, jam inside) such as are made at Christmas.