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MONSTER COOKIE SALE
HANSEL AND GRETEL
About the Hansel and Gretel Story
by Phyllis Wetherill
The children’s story which dominates the German kitchen is Hansel and Gretel, collected by the Brothers Grimm from story tellers and published in written form about 1832. This story has undergone two major changes of interest to cookie bakers: the embellishment of the witch’s house, and the addition of a fence around the house made of gingerbread boys and girls. One version states that the witch turned into a large gingerbread cookie in the oven.
When Engelbert Humperdinck wrote the opera Hansel and Gretel, his sister, Frau Adelheid Wette, wrote the libretto. She added to it the idea of a fence made of previously captured children who were turned to gingerbread. When the witch was killed, the gingerbread children were restored to life and could return to their families. The theatric value of this change is obvious; some Hansel and Gretel stories keep this variation.
The first cutters made by the Educational Products Company were of Hansel, Gretel, the witch, the gingerbread house and a tree. The set, made in 1947, was featured in the Women’s Home Companion in 1948. Other companies have made boy and girl cutters which adapt themselves to being used as Hansel and Gretel. A rather shapeless cutter made in Germany makes Hansel and Gretel cookies when colorful, preprinted pictures are glued in the cookies with frosting.
THE HISTORY OF THE COOKIE
The History Of Cookies!
A little cookie history: The first cookies were created by accident. Cooks used a small amount of cake batter to test their oven temperature before baking a large cake. These little test cakes were called "koekje", meaning "little cake" in Dutch.
Originally called "little cakes," cookies are made with sweet dough or batter, baked in single-sized servings and eaten out-of-hand. Perfect for snacking or as dessert, cookies are consumed in 95.2 percent of U.S. households. Americans alone consume over 2 billion cookies a year, or 300 cookies for each person annually.
Cookies are most often classified by method of preparation - drop, molded, pressed, refrigerated, bar and rolled. Their dominant ingredient, such as nut cookies, fruit cookies or chocolate cookies, can also classify them. Whether gourmet, soft or bite-sized cookies, new categories are always cropping up as the American appetite for cookies continues to grow.
History
The word cookie originally came from the Dutch keokje, meaning "little cake." In addition, the Dutch first popularized cookies in the United States. 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.
Sometime in the 1930s, so the story goes, a Massachusetts innkeeper 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.
Historians credit the innkeeper, Ruth Wakefield, with inventing what has since become an American classic - the chocolate chip cookie.
The earliest cookie-style cakes are thought to date back to seventh-century Persia, one of the first countries to cultivate sugar. There are six basic cookie styles, any of which can range from tender-crisp to soft. A drop cookie is made by dropping spoonfuls of dough onto a baking sheet. Bar cookies are created when a batter or soft dough is spooned into a shallow pan, then baked, cooled and cut into bars.
Hand-formed (or molded) cookies are made by shaping dough by hand into small balls, logs, crescents and other shapes.
Pressed cookies are formed by pressing dough through a COOKIE PRESS (or PASTRY BAG) to form fancy shapes and designs.
Refrigerator (or icebox) cookies are made by shaping the dough into a log, which is refrigerated until firm, then sliced and baked. Rolled cookies begin by using a rolling pin to roll the dough out flat; then it is cut into decorative shapes with COOKIE CUTTERS or a pointed knife.
Other cookies, such as the German SPRINGERLE, are formed by imprinting designs on the dough, either by rolling a special decoratively carved rolling pin over it or by pressing the dough into a carved COOKIE MOLD. In England, cookies are called biscuits , in Spain they're galletas , Germans call them keks, in Italy they're biscotti and so on.
The first American cookie was originally brought to this country by the English, Scots, and Dutch immigrants. Our simple "butter cookies" strongly resemble the English tea cakes and the Scotch shortbread.
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.
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.
There are hundreds upon hundreds of cookie recipes in the United States. No one book could hold the recipes for all the various types of cookies.