Time for a sweet treat of a word!
Cookie. In American English, we all know what this means. Yummy…
Tasty…
Delicious sweet treats…
My favorites are soft and chewy. Some prefer crisp and buttery. But in my opinion, all cookies are awesome. What they aren’t, however, is called the same thing everywhere, or in all of history.
I noticed when finding Colonial-era recipes that cookies were at the time called “little cakes.” What I didn’t realize was that the word cookie, which infiltrated American English by 1808, is from the Dutch koekje, which literally means “little cake.” Interestingly, while the Dutch had koekje, the Scottish also had cookie, as early as 1730, meaning “small, flat, sweet cake.” It’s thought that the American came from the Dutch, but it must surely have been influenced by the Scottish word of the same sound and meaning.
In the 1920s, the word was occasionally applied to people, especially women. The phrase “that’s the way the cookie crumbles” is from around 1955.
I admit, cookies are one of my favorite desserts. I can pass up cake, but not a cookie. What’s your favorite sweet treat?
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.
I'm a bit of a chocolate chip cookie snob…it took me more than ten years to find a great chocolate chip cookie recipe *I* could make. (Sometimes people made a great recipe, but when it was replicated in my kitchen it was only okay or good.)
Did you learn anything about spelling? My husband's grandma (age 95) still spells it cooky (and she's an intelligent, educated woman)…like in some older books. I know spellings change over time so I never asked her about this.
Chocolate chip cookies or mint chocolate chip cookies!