Why we're sweet on cookies
Cookies came to the New World with Dutch and English settlers, but Americans have truly made them their own, says P.J. Hamel, who has just helped test more than 20,000 cookies - rolled, shaped, bars, no bake - for a big cookbook that focuses on everyone's favorite sweet indulgence.
"Of Americans who bake at home ... 98 percent bake cookies," she says.
As editor/writer of "The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion" (The Countryman Press, $29.95), Ms. Hamel has given much thought to what's behind this popularity.
Some reasons are practical - many cookies aren't particularly complicated and don't take much time to whip up.
But largely, she thinks, cookies are No. 1 on the dessert hit parade because of nostalgia: "Most Americans grew up with their first sweet memory having something to do with cookies."
And as Hamel found when she sent an e-mail to King Arthur's employee-owners, requesting their favorite cookie recipes, many keep those memories alive by continuing to bake from their mothers' and grandmothers' recipes.
Hamel was intrigued to learn that cookies have changed through the generations. The biggest difference is that "early recipes had very, very few directions. Some of them were lists of ingredients with no directions at all," she says. "People back then knew what to do with their ingredients, and they didn't need you to tell them."
Recipes from the early 1900s "tended to be very simple," she notes. "I think it's because people didn't have access to a lot of different ingredients."
For cookies of more recent vintage, Hamel learned to pinpoint when a cookie was created by what it contained.
"As we got up into the 1950s, they tended to include a lot of wacky stuff, packaged foods and candied cherries and things like that," she says. "Then there was a little craze in the '70s where they were whole wheat. You could almost tell what decade the cookies were from by what they were focusing on."
Brownies, sugar cookies, and chocolate chip cookies "have stayed remarkably the same," she adds. "The best of those basic cookies are really the old recipes because they work. You don't need to do much to make them taste good. And what is better than a soft, moist oatmeal-raisin cookie? You really can't improve on that."
Cookie favorites vary regionally. "Molasses cookies are very popular in New England, but they're not that popular elsewhere," she says. New England, the upper Midwest, and Amish country are home to the big sandwich cookie known as a whoopie pie.
Brownies are favorites across the country, but fans of the rich chocolate bars tend to fall into two camps - the majority, who prefer their brownies chewy, and those who say the texture should be more like cake.
Actually, there's also a third way. The 509-page cookbook supplies an "in-between" recipe, On the Fence Brownies, which produces bars that are fudgy and moist but rise taller than a typical chewy brownie. "Those are actually my favorite brownies because they combine the best of both worlds," Hamel says.
