Cookie

A cookie (American English) or biscuit (British English) is a baked snack or dessert that is typically small, flat, and sweet. It usually contains flour, sugar, egg, and some type of oil, fat, or butter. It may include other ingredients such as raisins, oats, chocolate chips, or nuts.
Cookie texture varies from crisp and crunchy to soft and chewy, depending on the exact combination of ingredients and methods used to create them. Most English-speaking countries call crunchy cookies "biscuits", except for the United States and Canada, where "biscuit" refers to a type of quick bread. Chewier biscuits are sometimes called "cookies,” even in the Commonwealth. Some cookies may also be named by their shape, such as date squares or bars.
Biscuit or cookie variants include sandwich biscuits, such as custard creams, Jammie Dodgers, Bourbons, and Oreos, with marshmallows or jam filling and sometimes dipped in chocolate or another sweet coating. Cookies are often served with beverages such as milk, coffee, or tea and sometimes dunked, an approach which releases more flavour from confections by dissolving the sugars, while also softening their texture. Factory-made cookies are sold in grocery stores, convenience stores, and vending machines. Fresh-baked cookies are sold at bakeries and coffeehouses.
In many English-speaking countries outside North America, including the United Kingdom, the most common word for a crisp cookie is "biscuit". Where biscuit is the most common term, "cookie" often only refers to one type of biscuit, a chocolate chip cookie. However, in some regions both terms are used. The container used to store cookies may be called a cookie jar.
In Scotland, the term "cookie" is sometimes used to describe a plain bun.
Cookies that are baked as a solid layer on a sheet pan and then cut, rather than being baked as individual pieces, are called bar cookies in American English or traybakes in British English.
The word cookie dates from at least 1701 in Scottish usage where the word meant "plain bun", rather than thin baked good, and so it is not certain whether it is the same word. From 1808, the word "cookie" is attested "...in the sense of "small, flat, sweet cake" in American English. The American use is derived from Dutch koekje "little cake", which is a diminutive of "koek" ("cake"), which came from the Middle Dutch word "koke" with an informal, dialect variant koekie. According to the Scottish National Dictionary, its Scottish name may derive from the diminutive form (+ suffix -ie) of the word cook, giving the Middle Scots cookie, cooky or cu(c)kie. There was much trade and cultural contact across the North Sea between the Low Countries and Scotland during the Middle Ages, which can also be seen in the history of curling and, perhaps, golf.
Cookies are most commonly baked until crisp or else for just long enough to ensure a soft interior. Other types of cookies are not baked at all, such as varieties of peanut butter cookies that use solidified chocolate rather than set eggs and wheat gluten as a binder. Cookies are produced in a wide variety of styles, using an array of ingredients including sugars, spices, chocolate, butter, peanut butter, nuts, or dried fruits.
A general theory of cookies may be formulated in the following way. Despite its descent from cakes and other sweetened breads, the cookie in almost all its forms has abandoned water as a medium for cohesion. Water in cakes serves to make the batter as thin as possible, the better to allow bubbles—responsible for a cake's fluffiness—to form. In the cookie the agent of cohesion has become some form of oil. Oils, whether in the form of butter, vegetable oils, or lard, are much more viscous than water and evaporate freely at a far higher temperature. Thus a cake made with butter or eggs in place of water is much denser after removal from the oven.
Rather than evaporating as water does in a baking cake, oils in cookies remain. These oils saturate the cavities created during baking by bubbles of escaping gases. These gases are primarily composed of steam vaporized from the egg whites and the carbon dioxide released by heating the baking powder. This saturation produces the most texturally attractive feature of the cookie, and indeed all fried foods: crispness saturated with a moisture (namely oil) that does not render soggy the food it has soaked into.
Cookie-like hard wafers have existed for as long as baking has been documented, in part because they survive travel very well, but they were usually not sweet enough to be considered cookies by modern standards.
Cookies appear to have their origins in 7th century AD Persia, shortly after the use of sugar became relatively common in the region. They spread to Europe through the Muslim conquest of Spain. By the 14th century, they were common in all levels of society throughout Europe, from royal cuisine to street vendors. The first documented instance of the figure-shaped gingerbread man was at the court of Elizabeth I of England in the 16th century. She had the gingerbread figures made and presented in the likeness of some of her important guests.
With global travel becoming widespread at that time, cookies made a natural travel companion, a modernized equivalent of the travel cakes used throughout history. One of the most popular early cookies, which traveled especially well and became known on every continent by similar names, was the jumble, a relatively hard cookie made largely from nuts, sweetener, and water.
Cookies came to America through the Dutch in New Amsterdam in the late 1620s. The Dutch word "koekje" was Anglicized to "cookie" or cooky. The earliest reference to cookies in America is in 1703, when "The Dutch in New York provided...'in 1703...at a funeral 800 cookies...'"
The modern form of cookies, which is based on creaming butter and sugar together, did not appear commonly until the 18th century. The Industrial Revolution in Britain and the consumers it created saw cookies (biscuits) become products for the masses, and firms such as Huntley & Palmers (formed in 1822), McVitie's (formed in 1830) and Carr's (formed in 1831) were all established. The decorative biscuit tin, invented by Huntley & Palmers in 1831, saw British cookies exported around the world. In 1891, Cadbury filed a patent for a chocolate-coated cookie.
Cookies are broadly classified according to how they are formed or made, including at least these categories:
Other types of cookies are classified for other reasons, such as their ingredients, size, or intended time of serving:
Leah Ettman from Nutrition Action has criticized the high-calorie count and fat content of supersized cookies, which are extra large cookies; she cites the Panera Kitchen Sink Cookie, a supersized chocolate chip cookie, which measures 5+1⁄2 inches in diameter and has 800 calories. For busy people who eat breakfast cookies in the morning, Kate Bratskeir from the Huffington Post recommends lower-sugar cookies filled with "heart-healthy nuts and fiber-rich oats". A book on nutrition by Paul Insel et al. notes that "low-fat" or "diet cookies" may have the same number of calories as regular cookies, due to added sugar.
There are a number of slang usages of the term "cookie". The slang use of "cookie" to mean a person, "especially an attractive woman" is attested to in print since 1920. The catchphrase "that's the way the cookie crumbles", which means "that's just the way things happen" is attested to in print in 1955. Other slang terms include "smart cookie" and "tough cookie." According to The Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms, a smart cookie is "someone who is clever and good at dealing with difficult situations." The word "cookie" has been vulgar slang for "vagina" in the US since 1970. The word "cookies" is used to refer to the contents of the stomach, often in reference to vomiting (e.g., "pop your cookies", a 1960s expression, or "toss your cookies", a 1970s expression). The expression "cookie cutter", in addition to referring literally to a culinary device used to cut rolled cookie dough into shapes, is also used metaphorically to refer to items or things "having the same configuration or look as many others" (e.g., a "cookie cutter tract house") or to label something as "stereotyped or formulaic" (e.g., an action movie filled with "generic cookie cutter characters"). "Cookie duster" is a whimsical expression for a mustache.
Cookie Monster is a Muppet on the children's television show Sesame Street. He is best known for his voracious appetite for cookies and his famous eating phrases, such as "Me want cookie!", "Me eat cookie!" (or simply "COOKIE!"), and "Om nom nom nom" (said through a mouth full of food).
Cookie Clicker is a game where players click a cookie to buy upgrades to make more cookies.