Cookies! Cookies! Cookies!

Scotty's dog, Benny, came over for two weeks. Friend. Uh, you know Benny. They kind of just coexist. We kind of joked that he didn't know how to be a dog, but he learned how to be a dog while he was here a little bit being around our guys for two weeks. But Scotty got married, by the way, So congratulations Scotty and little it's congratulations Goddie. I gotta send him like an ice cream maker or something. And I got to aficiate my first wedding, which was fun. What

is going on? Yeah, it was really really enjoyed it quite an honor. So that explains why you went through Catechism, that's right. Yeah, so they got married, went on their honeymoon for two weeks. We had Benny, but I don't know why I started with that. Oh, Benny doesn't bark, because Benny does know how to be a dog. But he learned how to bark while he was here. Man, that's not something you want your dog to learn, because I have the barking his dogs of all time. He said, Oh,

that's that's that. Okay, I've heard of that before. That's fascinating. Let me try. But there's nothing to do with cookies. No, but everything henceforth in this episode we'll have to do with cookies. Yeah, and I'm baking cookies tonight, by the way, thank you. I yes. Restarting researching this, I was like, I'm baking cookies too. And I want to give a

huge shout out to uh Sally's baking addiction. Who is brown butter chocolate chip cookie recipe is hands down the finest example of a chocolate chip cookie I've ever encountered in my life. Yes, I mean, like days later, still chewy, amazing stuff and it's worth the little extra effort and making brown butter just totally worth it. I can't overstate how good that recipe is, so you're not one of those weirdos. It likes a good crisp chocolate chip cookie.

It's a little bit crisp beyond the edges, a little bit chewy in the middle. It's it's a balance of everything. But I can go either way. It's pretty. It's got to be like a pretty lousy chocolate chip cookie for me to not want it. You know, Yeah, I'll take a crispy one. But boy, that the fresh out of the oven kind that like folds down like a hot slice of New York pizza. Yes, dude, I actually went and purchased actual cow's milk to drink with while I

ate these cookies. They were it was that special whole milk. Yeah, okay, Yeah, there were like chunks of fat just knocking around at

the top of the milk bottle. Uh. There's We're gonna talk a lot about the cookies we like and don't like in here, and what makes certain cookies great, of course, but I guess we should just go a little bit with the history and that the fact that a cookie is you know, it's sort of like a cake, but the ratio of ingredients is different, and that with a cake you end up with what's called batter, and with cookie you end up with what's called dough because of

the ratio of your ingredients. Yeah, and also sometimes the ingredients themselves can differ. But if there's any other baked good that a cookie resembles most closely, it's probably a cake. In fact, I think the Cambridge and Collins dictionaries both defined cookies as sweet usually round, flat cakes, which it seems sensible, but when you really dig into it, you're like, this actually doesn't fully hold up. Yeah, the cookies a cookie, Yeah, because the cake, if you want to get you know,

jiggy with it. A cookie um is its own thing. You hold a cookie with you eat it with your hand. It's a self contained thing. A cookie is just one cookie, and you can eat multiple cookies. But a cake is like one big unit that you cut into subunits called slices and usually eat it with a fork. So a cookie is not a cake, and don't call it that ever again, right unless it's a cupcake also not even

close to a cookie, that's right. But you do eat that with your hand, which kind of under undermines that whole idea that a cookie is just a dessert you eat with your hand. It's a handcake, I guess. So, but isn't that really a cupcake not a cookie? Well, no, that's what I'm saying. A cupcake is a handcake. Oh okay, gotcha.

Well then we're on the same page. Finally, it's also not a bread, even though you might hear gingerbread or short bread bread as we know, and you know, cookies kind of come from all of this tradition of of bread baking and biscuit making and stuff like that in a way, but gingerbreads and shortbreads they don't have leavening agents like bread does. They're not gonna rise like a bread is supposed to rise. And uh flour bread flour has got usually more gluten going on in it. Yeah.

I mean like if you look at um cookie dough and then you look at bread dough, it's it's like two totally different things. Yeah, two different things. So not really a bread, not really cake. So you might say a pastry, it's a pastry. No wrong again, because pastries at their base usually have some sort of flower of some sort of fat and the water and it didn't see water. Yeah. I looked up a bunch of pastry recipes, Croissants and Danish is water. I didn't see water in

any of them, but water in all of them. None of them had water. It's it's implied in the recipe. Just work with okay, all right. It's so universally known that you pull water in in pastries that you they don't even include it in the recipe. The one recipe I did say that I saw this headwater was a bear claw. Really yeah, like a bear claw croissant doesn't have water and not the recipes. That's really interesting. So a lot of people do say cookies are a type

of pastry. I've seen elsewhere that that's not the case. No, it's a cookie. So I came up with a definition of cookies, if I may share it myself, A cookie is quote. I'm quoting myself here, so I don't know if it's right to actually say quote, but usually small, off and round, usually flat, handheld dessert consisting of at

least flour, a fat like oil or butter, and sugar. That, friends, is probably the greatest definition of cookie anyone's ever put to paper, the only issue I would take is usually round, because I've seen a lot of chipped cookies. But but that's why I said, usually, okay, what would you say, sometimes round? Frequently round? I might bump that up to often I said off and round? I thought you said usually no, usually small, off and round, usually flat. Okay, alright, boy,

I like it. Okay, So we've got the definition of cookies, and I appreciate you indulge in me because I really did kind of wade through a lot of the Internet to put that together. But there was something in there that's really important too, which is sugar. And you think, well, yeah, of course sugar cookies are sweet. Well, there's other things you can sweeten cookies with besides sugar, Like you got

molasses cookies, you've got honey cookies. Um, there's a lot of different cookies you can you can make, but if you dig into those recipes, you're gonna find they still use sugar. And sugar is an extremely important um ingredient. As we'll see a lot of people say basically, cookies didn't exist until sugar came along. Yeah, depending on where you are in the world, they're going to call them

different things. If you watch ted Lasso, you're gonna know they call them biscuits in England, uh and also Australia. In Spain there gelattas. The Germans call them kicks. I don't know what that Christmas cookie. Don't even how to pronounce that you took German? You don't know. I was gonna ask you. I don't know. Man, that's five consonants just to start the award. Please chin t l z H. I would say it's probably like petch gin or something. Okay, but again, no vowels in the beginning of that and

most of that word. Yes, what about Italy? Oh you're talking about to be Scotty? Very nice? Yeah, which you can find wrapped in a little jar at your local um coffee place. Yeah, I'm not a fan of about Scotty. It really depends. But no, for the most most part, I'm not. Which it's a good thing we're not alive and like the or fifteenth century, because we wouldn't have had many options, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, I get it that almondy taste is fine, but if I'm

gonna burned calories on a cookie, it ain't. It's not gonna be a b Scotty, I got you, you know what I mean. So the word cookie itself chuck comes from the Dutch, who have the word uh cook j ko e k j e means small or little cake once again, right, So oh that's There's a lot of different words for cookies, that's the point. But cookies are their own thing, um, and over thousands of years people

have said these are great. I like this. I'm going to contribute to humanity's understanding of of baking by creating this cookie and that cookie. And now finally we're living in what I consider the pinnacle of the age of cookies, because I can't imagine we're going to come up with better cookies that aren't just variations of what we have now.

I feel like we've created all of the great cookies, and that really, if you dig into it, most of the greatest ones, the apex, the pinnacle of them, were created here in the good old Us of a agreed but not the first cookies because we're a young country and most people say that cookies have been around since Persia around seventh century CE. Uh. They had sugar for a while, and they had been making cakes and things

like that. You had be you know, pretty wealthy. And that's a sort of a repeated thing you'll see in here. As far as the early days of sugar being available, you had to have pretty much a lot of money and be part of royalty or at least super wealthy to eat these sweet confections. But at some point there was a Persian baker who said, all right, I got a test out. I'm making a cake. I want to

see if this oven is ready. We don't have thermometers or anything like that, so let me just throw a little bit of this uh I guess dough in there and see what happens. And it came out this little little baby cake and tasted awesome, and so whatever accents the Persians might have used, said, this is fantastic. Let me keep doing this. I've discovered a new thing. Yeah, they said, like, why don't I just make a batch

of test cakes only? And the cookie was born. That's the story, It's not it's it's not entirely clear if that's true. Um, it's spread all over the internet. I'm not just in like the copy pay way like it does seem to be that. Food historians tend to think like that's that's possibly what happened. But even if that is true, it ignores a lot of the previous evolution that led to two cookies, um, that came before the Persians. Yeah,

and you know, we kind of mentioned this early. You know, it comes from the tradition of baking bread, of course, something that we've been doing for fourteen thousand years. But those those have those leavening agents. Uh. The Mediterraneans used to honey and they made these honey pastries for a long long time. The Russians made these cookies called uh priyan nix something like yeah, no, of you, I don't I don't know, Okay, They're made from honey, rye, flower

and berries and those go back to fourth century BC. Uh. And then we have our good old biscuits, Yeah, which are they seemed to kind of have evolved from the Romans who created something called rusk, which is you know

what you don't like about biscotti. Yeah, take away anything even remotely likable about biscotti, and you've got rusk where it was like it was a yeah, hard tech what what like the Navy's um adopted and use this hard tech and the reason that I think it was initially created was because the Roman soldiers who were going further and further afield, conquering all these different lands, they were supplied with this this rusk as rations because what they

would do is they would bake bread and then they would cut the bread into pieces and they would bake it again, which would remove almost all of the water content, all the moisture content from it. And you'd still have the nutrients, but none of the moisture, which means that it would um, it would stay for keep for a very long time, like it wouldn't it wouldn't mold because

it didn't have any water to create mold. Yeah. I mean when you hear that story, like why would they purposely just keep making it and making it tastes worse and worse. But it was just a necessity for for rations. It was preserving it. Yeah. And there's a there's a name for that baking process, right, that's right. Biscato from Italian means twice baked. And that's where you get biscotti. Yeah. Not only is that where you get biscotti, chuck, that's

also where you get biscuits. With the uk Um and Australia New Zealand and a few other places referred to their cookies as biscuits. That's a derivation of biscato. That's right, pretty neat. This is making me nothing but hungry. That's okay, because there's plenty of cookies in your future. I can see it now, and I also see chuck in our future and ad break happening. This is very nice, that's

all that coming. So okay. So, as we said, most food his storians who think about these kind of things say, yeah, it was Persia. Persia's the place where, um, where cookies

were kind of invented. And the reason you can't really argue with that is because if you are of European ancestry or live in a country that was founded through European colonization, there's a pretty good chance that all of the cookies that you've ever been exposed to came after the introduction of sugar and cookies and spices um by the Persians to the Europeans through the Crusades. That's right.

The crusades happen, and anytime there's a conquering nation, one thing is for sure going to happen, and they are going to spread, They're going to find all the delicious, wonderful things that that culture does, and they're going to steal them and take them back to their home lands. And that's how things spread throughout the world. And that's

what happened with cookies. Yeah, and sugar, that's right. So starting these Arab countries and they said, let's bring back ginger and cinemam and cardamum and the sugar and all this delicious stuff, and let's start making our own cookies. Yeah.

And then one of the reasons why all of this stuff was in Persia at the time, Chuck, is not just because the Persians had already started cultivating sugar they had easy access to it, but they had access to things like ginger too, like you said, um, which came from Asia Um or East Asia, I should say um. And the reason that they had access to this is because they were pretty well located along the Silk Road. But Europe, and especially Western Europe, was located very far

off of the Silk Road. So even though this stuff was pretty commonly traded further east, you could not get it in Europe unless you were one of the most fabulously wealthy people on the planet at the time. Yeah, and you know, as time crept on a little bit, there was a little more access us two things like sugar, but it was still, um, kind of like a special occasion thing. You didn't necessarily have to be super wealthy.

But it wasn't like all of a sudden, the working class of Europe was all of a sudden just baking cookies all the time. Um. But that did give birth to a tradition, which is if it's a special occasion thing like oh, I don't know, Christmas time, then that became a tradition, is making cookies and handing out cookies to neighbors. Because you're not gonna bake a bunch of cakes and deliver thirty five cakes to your neighbors because

that's a waste. But what you could do, like our old friend Mona Collin teen used to do, she stopped. I don't think she listens anymore anyway, she'll never hear this. But it was really nice, Like I mean, maybe ten different varieties every year, big box of it was great. It was great. But that's where that tradition comes from. Around Christmas time, on special occasions, baking batches of cookies and sharing them with friends and neighbors. Because they were

splurging to show off for Baby Jesus. Sure, that's what you do. So um. One of the things I came across though, was that a family in medieval Europe or Middle Aged Europe, um baking cookies around the holidays, we're probably breaking the law. Because the trade guilds were really powerful at the time. And among those trade guilds where the baker's guilds who had managed to get laws and acted that said you can't even bake for yourself in

your own home. You have to buy your bake goods from a baker who's a member of a trade guild, a trained baker. Um. And apparently everybody said nuts to that. We're not We're not going to listen to that. And over the course of a century or two, those that kind of enforcement went away because who doesn't want to bake in their own home? You know? Yeah? I mean, I'm a union guy, but I draw the line at some point, you know, Yeah, baking in your own home

is that line? Yeah? And it literally became the will of the people, and they were just like, no, no no, no, we're not doing this anymore. We gotta bake at home. Uh, they were you know, some of the first recipes and some of the first cookbooks in North America were cookie recipes. Yeah, not just that, like even earlier than that, there was um cookbooks that came out in like the sixteenth century, the early seventeenth century, and they started having cookie recipes

in them and cake recipes in them. Uh. And the reason why, one of the reasons why it was because the European powers had started to call in nice places where you could grow sugar, because people had gotten a little taste of sugar and the demand was so great that they went out and actually conquered new areas so that they could grow sugar, which lowered the prices of sugar, which meant that the average household was way more likely to be able to afford it, and say like the

sixteenth or seventeenth or probably eighteenth century, um. And that as a result led to these cookbooks coming up, like like there's one called The Good Huswife's Jewel Chuck, did you say housewife? Know? Huzzwives? What is that? Just I guess a variation of I guess an old old timey English way to put it. But if you look at there's a recipe for fine cakes in there, and if you look at it, you're like, how did anybody produce

anything like this? Like we we expect extremely precise recipes these days when you open a cookbook, well for baking especially, Yeah, because I mean it's a science experience, a chemical reaction you're doing with baking. Cooking is a little more like an art, right. So with a Good Housewife jewel with the recipe for fine cakes, you could find um ingredients like take two or three yolks of eggs in a good quantity of sugar. Yeah, and I think each one

was was signed like good luck, Yeah, figure it out. Yeah. But but apparently people got it right enough of the time that these things really started to take off and people were would bake cookies more and more. Yeah. We mentioned shortbreads earlier that came from Scotland, and the name shortbread might sound a little weird, but it was, um, it was sort of a hybrid. It was it basically

means crumbly cookie. Um. Yeast was swapped out for butter and sugar was added in when they had this leftover bread and these hard biscuits, and it became shortbread and they used short met crumbly. So that's where the crumbley comes from and the uh there was a tax on biscuits, and then the Scottish Heritage site says that they called it bread to get around the tax on biscuit. So that's why the only reason it's called shortbread, basically it

should have been called crumbly cookie exactly. Yeah. Somebody, some tax collectors, like, that's a cookie. He said, no, it's a it's a bread. It's a short bread. Quiet. Yeah, that got me looking into the etymology of how the cookie crumbles and it's It was one of those uh, sort of disappointing ones where they just said, like uh mid like nine fifties America, not Scotland in the eighteenth century. Yeah, it couldn't be traced back to uh like a specific person.

And basically they some people said it might have come from like say lev In France. Uh, but I just I just love that line. In the apartment and Billy Wilder is the apartment. He says it a couple of times. He says, that's how it crumbles. Cookie wise said that that's how the cookie crumbles. He said, that was it? Jack Lemon. Jack Lemon said that, Yeah, that's just a nice little turn of phrase by Billy Wilder. Good stuff, man. I ended up watching Casablanca the other night. It just

happened beyond and I caught it towards the beginning. It really is maybe the greatest movie ever made. It is amazingly good. Like I liked it during my James Dean like Humphrey Bogart teenage phase, but as an adult watching it, I haven't seen it in many, many years. It's just it's astounding how good it is, the acting, correcting, the lighting. It's crazy. I need to do it. Chuck you will

like it is such a good movie. I can't imagine than anybody's ever seen Cassi Blanc have been like that sucked? Probably so have you seen The Apartment? No? I never have. Al Right, well i'll trade you gotta see that. That was on movie Crush. That was our good friend Scott Ackerman. That was his movie, pick the Apartment or Cassi Blanca, The Apartment. And Scott is such a pro and such

a sweetheart. He rewatched the movie and uh like reread Mike multiple chapters of Billy Wilder's book in preparation for that episode. That's what like what a pro he is and designed an original movie poster for it. Yeah, did he signed for me? That's nice. It sounds like Scott Ackerman. Yeah. So alright, short bread is where we were cookies, Well,

we were talking. I think what the point we were trying to get across is that, like the Europeans had like a bananza golden age of cookie development after sugar became widely available, say, starting in the fifteen hundred, sixteen hundred, seventeen hundreds. And so you've got short bread created in Scotland.

Macaroon was created way earlier in Italy, but it spread its way to France and then England got its hands right, the macaroon different um, the coconutty kind that's crispy on the outside, very chewy on the inside, and it's kind of like a ball almost. Yeah, not a fan. Oh I like them. I like them. I like a macron too. I I don't really discriminate, like it has to be again, it's got to be a pretty bad cookie. Usually it's got to be a mass produced, industrialized cookie. As somebody

cooked it at home, I'm probably going to like it. Yeah, yeah, no, I'm with you. And then gingerbread cookies to chuck um. They made their first appearance in the fifteenth century. Yeah, so we mentioned Greece coming over from China. But the cookie itself, I believe started in Greece about b C. And uh Medieval England. Medieval England preserved ginger um was what gingerbread was called. But that's not like the dessert

that we're talking about. The dessert is, you know, is that delicious sort of molasses gingery cookie that eventually they started making into people shapes because of Queen Elizabeth the first when dignitaries would uh visit, they would she would she would have cookies shaped like them in tribute, and that's how they came to be made. I think that was Tie Gilliam. You just did. Actually, I think didn't we on a Christmas episode do someone gingerbread houses or

gingerbread man? Yeah, I think we did it. May it may have been our live one that we did in two thousand eighteen. I'll have to look. Remember we've got the handy list of everything we've ever done on Christmas episodes that. Yeah, so you want to take a break and then talk about cookies coming to their rightful place where they will truly enter their true Golden Age America, USA. Yes, that's right. We should insert like a bald eagle scream here. Oh,

we'll be right back. So one of the reasons all the people chuck who are like, stop talking about how great America and it's cookies are. One of the reasons why our cookies are so great is because America has always been a melting pot of immigrants coming from all

these different places. And one of the things that all these immigrants brought with them where their cookies and their cookie ideas, their cookie traditions and all that stuff got blended together and inspired people that come up with new stuff too, and now we have even better cookies, but they improved upon the traditions of the of grids who

came here in the first place. That's right. And depending on where you go in the United States today, you're gonna see traces of those original immigrant populations and the cookies that they brought by probably how popular the cookies in that region still are today. If you go to the Midwest, maybe uh, I don't know, Michigan, Ohio, you might eat a pixel. I think it's bizele bazell I think so. Yeah. I remember people calling it in Toledo. Okay, they're probably like, oh my god, chuck that one up.

It's like a pizzas a round flat thing. A pizel is like a little round flat thing basically all right, but it's not like have you ever had one? Yeah? I think so. It's like a little it's like a little waffle, but not a stroop waffle. Yes, No, it's like a waffle. It's a little thicker than a stroop waffle. Um part um. It's almost like a crispi er um doughier funnel cake that's much thinner and flatter, and it's often flavored with annis and it can be really good,

but it can also be really dry and not good. Yeah. But it's made in a little like waffle of iron mold. Yes, I think it's one of those things where you really want to eat a pizel, like fresh out of the iron. What I call it a pizel pitzel. Yeah, that's not right. That wasn't right. It's a pitzel cookie. I believe that the Scottish shortbreads eventually became tea cakes here in the South, which can be a thing. Evidently, I haven't had a lot of teacakes but I think it's like part of

the old sort of southern tradition. Yeah, and like you said to Chuck, I mean like Americans were cool with cookies from the from the earliest stages of the country. The first ever cookbook that was written by an American printed in America was printed in sevent It's called American Cookery by Amelia Simmons, and she had a bunch of different cookie recipes in there. She did. She had a few gingerbread cookie recipes. I think one reportedly is by

George Washington's mother. And uh, all kinds of fun names. Kinka Woodles or how about a how about a tangle Breech? I like that one, that's pretty good. What about plunkets or cry babies? Cry baby sounds pretty good, it is, but that's also the name of that little um. Remember the sugar Daddy bar. Sugar Daddy bar, it's like a very very chewy, I don't know what. Okay, So they cut those into little kind of rabbit poop size pieces and I think coated them with chocolate and called those

sugar babies. No, they're not coated in chocolate, which I think is a failing. So that's what I always associated with with cry babies, even though they're called sugar babies. Okay, either that or that Johnny Depp John Waters movie of the nineties. Yeah, baby Jolly Boys. That was another cookie name met old cookbook. These are kind of fun. Sniack or doodle not in there. No, And apparently snicker doodle has give some sort of German derivation, but I'm not

sure about that. One thing I found researching cookies, Chuck, is that there's a lot of contradictory information out there. Sure that we invented it. Well, the sugar cook the sneaker doodle is sort of a play on the sugar cookie, as is the ice sugar cookie, which is the only kind of sugar cookie. I like, Oh yeah, the ice one. You don't like snicker doodles, Huh, I consider that a sneaker doodle. I don't. I'm just talking about a standard

sugar cookie. I like a snicker doodle. Okay, yeah, I like sugar cookie, but I just I meant like the plain white sugar cookies. Yeah, I know. It's almost like you're kind of like, well, you didn't finish there's no frosting on here. Yeah, exactly, you know, so yeah, a little, a little, if you're everage is hard up for something like that. Just some like regular break and bake sugar cookies and like a tub of vanilla frosting is all you need to just recreate a world of wonder for yourself.

But yeah, you said the snickerdoodle and the sugar cookie I think came from German immigrants, the Moravians. Pennsylvania very famous for their stars as well. We have a Arabian star light which I'm a big fan of. But they were called Nazareth sugar cookies because of Nazareth Pennsylvania. Yeah, or some people call him Amish sugar cookies. And some people say, well, why wouldn't they just call him Moravian

sugar cookies because that would be too confusing. Because we can also thank our friends the Amish or the Moravians, the the group who moved to North Carolina for inventing the Moravian spice cookie, which is a very crispy, very thin little cookie um made with molasses and ginger and cinnamon that you have around the holidays. Yeah, it's close to gingerbread, but crispi er and thinner. Yes, And that

was an American made cookie as well. So both the sugar cookie and the morava and spice cookie were invented by the same sect of German Protestants who arrived in Pennsylvania in North Carolina, respectively. Mind blowing, very cool. Uh, we got to talk about the state cookie of New Mexico, the bisco cheeto. This was brought in by the Spanish colonists,

sort of co developed by the Pueblo people there. Uh and uh, you know areas like New Mexico what we now call New Mexico, and bizcocho means cakes in Spanish, so bisco cheeto means little cakes. Yeah, and bizcocho should be like, oh, yeah, it's kind of like biscodo, which it is. It's derived from that as well, like biscotti. Yeah, exactly, they're all cognates. I have not had a bisco cheeto cookie yet, but I planned to. Cinnamon and annas sounds

like a very waning combination. Yeah, I looked them up on the internet that they look tasty. They definitely do. But then I propose that it's maybe the most famous cookie of all. Would you agree or disagree? Am I over overstating things? No? I think the chocolate chip cookie is the at least from our view of the most famous cookie of all time. Okay, so that cookie is one of those few origin stories that you can say definitively, this person did this, and this is when they did it.

And no, there's not some other person out there who says that they were the ones who did it, and there's some evidence that they may have done it three years earlier. That's not the case. The chocolate chip cookie was invented by a woman named Ruth Wakefield in Whitman, Massachusetts, possibly in nineteen thirty maybe one. Apparently she didn't remember exactly when she did it, but she is the person who invented the chocolate chip cookie. And what's awesome about

is she invented it by accident. And where was it? At the toll house. In the toll house in there you are everyone. She was baking. She needed Baker's chocolate. She didn't have any that's that unsweetened chocolate that gives you know, like fudge and cake, a lot of flavor and the color. And she said, I don't have meny of that. So I got the semi sweet chocolate. I'm gonna chunk it up real good. And when she put

it in there. She found that those chunks did not just smelt him, become a part of the entire cookie. They held their shape and they came out, uh like little chocolate chips because of that lower cocoa butter content and bing bang boom chocolate chip cookie. Yeah, and she served him anyway. I guess she tried when it was like this is pretty boss, and they became like an instant hit at the toll house, and so it was

called the toll House Cookie. Um, and I guess words spread enough that I don't know if she approached Nestlie or Nestle approached her, but they struck a deal that they could print her recipe for toll House cookies using semi sweet chocolate chips on their bags of semi sweet chocolate chips, that her her cookie recipe was now helping to move pretty good in exchange for a lifetime of free chocolate. She said. She apparently thought it was just fine.

So she actually did end up cashing in. She sold her fully sold all of her rights to the toll House cookie what we call the chocolate chip cookie, to Nestley. I think I don't remember exactly when she did that. But they had it until nineteen eighty three and then lost the rights. Chuck. Yeah, I mean I think at a certain point it was just like, sorry, this belongs to the world. Yeah, there was, you can't own this anymore.

I saw eight poll that said that more people associated the term toll house with cookies or chocolate chip cookies in general than they did with Nestlie or any of its products. That was not the case for me. I always called chocolate chip cookies a chocolate chip cookie. Did you ever call him toll house cookies? Nope, cho chocolate chip cookies. It was a weird pole or people who were polled in this weird pole were very weird back in agreed, Although I don't remember. Maybe we did say

that when I was seven. I just I don't remember it at all. I mean a TV commercial set it. That didn't count. But that was a commercial for the Nestle bag of chips. They were chips. That's what I always thought of him. Man, Man, do you remember the butter scotch chips. I would just eat an entire bag of those things by myself, just just right out of the bag. Yeah, I mean the peanut butter chips, butter Scotch chips, if you throw a little the plain eminem's. Uh,

those those are all good variations. But but your classic chocolate chip cookie is is just a hands down winner. Yeah, and in particular Sally's making addictions. Brown butter America also birth the peanut butter cookie and the brownie, the oatmeal raisin cookie. Um, I get. Can we skip to brownie real quick and talk about that short of pedantis um? Yeah? Because I'm sure some people are brownies aren't cookies. Well

that's me. I just yeah, It's just it's one of those things where it's just it feels like a pedantic argument to call a brownie a cookie. Technically it's a pan cookie. But to me, a brownie is a brownie. And if someone comes up, I think it's the other way around, say no, brownie's a brownie? Is to say no, no, technically brownies for cookies. Well yeah, I mean, if anybody says it to you, just say hey, you want a brownie, and that just takes care of exactly. Why talk about it?

Just eat it? Right? But but the point is, this is a brownie is I'm just not letting this pass by. A brownie is a type of cookie is a bar cookie in the same way that a lemon bar is a bar cookie. Nana Emo, Um is a bar cookie. I'm pretty sure I'm saying that right, Um. And it's just a cookie where you you take the battery and you build it. You bake it in a single mass and then cut it into squares rather than baking them individually. But it's still a cookie. Not to me, it's not.

That's fine, that's totally fine. I just I could not explain it further. But consistency is different to me, the that the little flaky top is different. It's just all different. Well, let me ask you this, chuck. What about a chocolate chip brownie that is nothing more than a square, slightly thicker chocolate chip cookie. No, do you mean a choci a pan baked chocolate chip cookie. Yeah, well that's not a brownie. That's a that's a pan baked chocolate chip cookie.

But it looks exactly like a brownie. It's the same shape, but it has different consistency and doesn't have that flaky top. So to you, just just the brownie is its own thing. Yeah, okay, what about a lemon bar. It's a lemon bar. Okay, I can, I can. I can get with you on both of those. Actually, but I mean that's just you know, again, it's a this is a pedantic argument that that no

one should ever have. Those are my favorite kind. What you should do is just sit down, eat those cookies, Eat those brownies, Eat those eat those bar brownie cookies. Throw some ice cream on top, some hot fudge, some whipped cream. Put a lemon bar on there. I'm not a big lemon bar guy. Oh I like them, but they have to be totally by themselves. You wouldn't mix that with anything. No, I'm not a big fan of lemon cookies either, Like lemony sweets aren't my favorite. I

got you, I love them. I feel like, how if you take your likes and my likes and my dislikes and your just likes and put us together, we form a fully formed whole. You know, we would like every everything. So chuck. There's a couple of other kinds of cookies we need to shout out real quick. Um, the cutout cookie, where you roll them out and cut them out. That's

why they're called that. Like a Christmas sugar cookies are often cut out cookies that are fun I don't love to eat those as much like a a Christmas shaped cookie with the sprinkles on top. Uh, not my favorite. I'm I'm sort of a dropped cookie purest. Yeah. Drop cookies are kind of like a chocolate chip cookie where you like scoop them out by the spoonful and drop that mound on there and they kind of spread and flatten out as they bake, producing a round, flat dessert tree.

That's right. And by the way, brownies we know the edema or the etymology want to be just the origin story what Fannie Farmer in nineteen o five and been at the brownie? Uh, there's a story that a housewife in Maine forgot baking powder and their chocolate cake and it became a brownie. And that's in like some cooking encyclopedias. Not true, because that was in nineteen and twelve, and Fanny Farmers recipe was printed in nineteen o five. Yeah, and Fanny Farmer actually did a lot more than just

invent the brownie. She also is credited for inventing the oatmeal raisin cookie too. Oh really, Yeah, she's very prolific. See here's my deal. I listened to a judge John Hodgman the other day and Jesse Thorne, our friend and bailiff of that show called raisins a a b s addition to any sweet treat, which I generally agree. But I like an oatmeal raisin cookie and I'm not the biggest raising guy, A good one for sure, but that's pretty much the limit of raisins in in dessert unless

it's just a fistful of raisins. The Great Clinic Swood movie, It's right, they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel. Uh what about the ice box cookie? So those came along after the image of the ice box obviously, but usually you take the dough and you roll it into a log, chill it, and then you cut it into

slices and those slices are baked as cookies. Yeah. If you look at a pin wheel cookie, that that swirly shape comes because it's rolled up and chilled, or the logs of like ready to bake cookie dough you find in like the dairy issle, that's that's an ice box cookie. Technically, I disagree because that's not rolled flat. That's just a big tube. So no, no, it's not rolled flat. A pin wheel cookies not roll flat either. It's rolled into like a tube, but cylinder, and then you cut the

cylinder into slices. No, no, no, it's rolled flat and then it's rolled so it's got it's got rings saying I got you, I got you. Um yeah, I think the final product and the fact that it's a tube in the fridge makes it an ice box cookie. Alright, that's not just me saying that. Either you got your classic sandwich cookie, which everything from an oreo to a macron to uh those great ritz peanut butter ritz chocolate

dip things that his grandmother used to make. Who, by the way, is turning a hundred and one this year. I'm not on Facebook anymore, but Mary's turning a hundred and one and a couple of weeks. Hey you did Facebook, Good for you, Jack. Yeah, I deleted my account. I'm I was out of there. That is what they call mental health. I did miss it at all. No, did it take any kind of transition period for you? You know? The only thing I missed that was actually genuinely hard

was the movie crush page and the movie Crushers Page. Uh. Those were awesome and it was a great community. It is a great community, I hope still. But that was the hardest part to leave because I really really enjoy my interactions. There was a very kind little corner of the internet. But having said that, it was all for my well being, so I had to let that go even Yeah, so anyway, Mary's a hundred one soon. I

want to let the stuff. You should know Army that I'm glad that came up actually, because she's she's you know, she's not doing the best here at a hundred one, but she's hanging in there. Well, a super duper hooper. Happy birthday to you, Mary, hundred one. That is amazing. That is really impressive. But back to sandwich cookies. You also got your stroop waffle. I think I mentioned the macaron get to Malamar's Catch your moon pies Oreos. Yeah,

it's classic. Apparently, the whoopee pie is the original sandwich cookie and that we can thank our Amish friends for as well. Supposedly, the name came from Amish workers on job sites going whoopy when they opened their lunch pail and found a whoopee pie inside. Yeah, I like a whoopee pie, just the cake if it has too much cake to fill it, it becomes a little cumbersome. Point definitely has to be just right. But researching this chuck it. Maybe wonder if oreos were meant to be like kind

of some sort of manufactured whoopee pie. Maybe I will say this, the only oreo worth eating is the double stuff. Do you like the the golden kind or the chocolate kind or both? I don't. I don't try the variations. I like the regular What about you like them? Pretty much? All? There's only been a couple of weird oreos that I was like, Man, not this one. Okay, there's all kinds of crazy flavors now, right. Yeah, the birthday cake and the rice Crispy Tree oreos were pretty great. The birthday

cake thing has infested every area of the sweet realm. Yeah, for good reason though. I mean, you get some frosting in there, well, that's pretty much it. That's an excuse to put frosting in something that wasn't otherwise there, or in the case of an oreo, you're putting frosting inside of austing and that is amazing. I've got something else here. Now,

we've got a few more little tidbits cookie dough. I tried to find out sort of the rise of eating cookie dough and it becoming a thing, and no one really knows when it started to be a big thing. I mean they think nostalgia obviously has a big part in it with looking the better off, the mixing things. But they said that this new generation, like Gen Z,

has taken it to a new level. Uh. And they in college towns cookie dough is triple in sales what it is in a regular town, partially because dorms don't have ovens, but partially because the younger generation just eats the stuff up. Yeah, there's this is all safe to eat now. I know everyone thinks it's eggs, but it's usually the flower that caused causes problems. Yeah, it's bacteria and the flower. And so they said, salmonella and eggs is really if you take care of your eggs, it's

really not much of a problem. Most eggs are pasteurized. Now yeah, well that too. But like if you if you buy the cookie dough that you're allowed to eat in the grocery store, like just right out of the thing, like cookie dough for eating it has got treated flour.

It's uh, it's called heat treated flour, which means Yeah, they just bring the flower up to about a hundred and sixty five degrees fahrenheit for a little while, and then that that takes care of any bacteria and then you can just eat cookie dough like it's going out of stop. I did not know that. Thank you for that one, man. That's the fact of the podcast right there. And the cookie dough ice cream that started in by Ben and Jerry's and their Vermont scoop shop. Yeah, that's

good stuff. Apparently it was anonymous suggestion on their suggestion board. Yeah, man, that was nice. So somebody really lost out on something big royalties. They left another anonymous suggestion saying, can I have a little bit of money from my idea? You've got some other good facts here, don't you. Yeah, best selling cookie in the world, Chuck, what is it? Oh jeez, I don't know. Oreo? Oh is it Orio? It is?

Or at least in two thousand fourteen, the latest I could find was um okay, But I think that bears reminding me. I know we've talked about it before that Oreo is actually the knockoff that Hi Drocks was the original, and Oreo came along and knocked off Hi Drocks and then became the greatest selling cookie in the world. Ah, that's right. I love that story. I like this bit you have on Famous Amos to the very famous Famous

Amos cookies. Uh. I don't think I knew this. Wally Amos was an agent, the first African American agent at the William Morris Agency, and he would bake these cookies to give his axe to be like, hey, how about some cookies you want to stay with me? Right? And they were really popular and he spun it off and founded his own company. Yes, and then I got one more chuck Um. People leave cookies out for Santa, right. Sure, you'd think they'd be pretty old, but actually apparently they've

traced it back to the Great Depression in America. Uh Santa cookies. Yeah, that they were teaching kids to show gratitude and appreciation for the gifts that they were getting, and that was some parents started that, and that was where kids started leaving cookies out for Santa. That's what I saw. I saw in multiple places. Yeah, at a very unlikely time. That's very nice. So that's it for cookies everybody. I think the only thing left to do is to go eat some cookies. I wouldn't know how

many people are going to bake cookies tonight. That's great. That was kind of the point. I wanted everybody to bake. And I also want to shout out some of our sources, the Nibble's Cooking America and many many many others. Um uh. And since I said many many many others and Chuck said yum, that means it's time for a listener mail. Well, what it's time for is to talk about Sketch Fest. Okay, but because we're returning to the live stage, everybody and uh,

we want to see you. It's a vaccinated only show. It is a masked show. We're gonna do it as safely as possible. And this is on January one, at the best comedy festival in the land. Yeah, we'll be at the Sydney Goldstein Theater and you can get tickets at SF sketch Fest dot com. And it will be the first time in two years that we will have been on stage. So um, it's gonna be fun to see for you guys. One way or another, whether we

bomb or not, that's one that will be great. It'll be a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to it really miss getting on stage, so it's gonna be great. So we'll see you guys January two. And Chuck, speaking of two, this is our last regular episode of one. So first, I want to wish my dear sweet wife you me very very happy birthday today. Um she actually I said, Hey, which would you rather know more about

contortionists or cookie? And she said cookies? So I dedicated this episode to her, and UM, I think we should wish everybody out there a very very happy new year in the hopes that two is a really, really great year, don't you. That's right. Thanks for all the support, not only this year but over all the years that allow us to have one of the best jobs in the world. It means everything to us, and ye all mean everything

to us, and so thanks a lot. I hope you had a great or at least a better and maybe things will be even better next year. If you want to get in touch with us to tell us how great your news EVE was, you can send it in an email to Stuff Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.