A Sugar Cookie by Any Other Name - by Jo-Ann Roberts

 

Last weekend we attended a 50th wedding anniversary party for our best friends in Connecticut. It was a great party with great friends, a great family, and great food. 

...and I brought two trays of Italian cookies. Last year, at our 50th wedding anniversary party, I mentioned to our friends' children that I would make cookies. They were quick to remind me of my offer in late summer. Little did I know that I would have three...3...books due around the same time and chronic leg pain. However, I pushed on, and with my husband's help, was able to get the cookies made, and two books written. (The third is a wip due out in December).

You may ask what does this have to do with sugar cookies?  Not much, but while I was looking online for a particular Italian-filled cookie, I came across several blogs on sugar cookies, and the history of this treat is as simple and straightforward as the cookie itself.

A sugar cookie is a cookie made with sugar, flour, butter, eggs vanilla, and either baking powder or baking soda. They may be formed by hand, dropped, or rolled and cut into shapes. They may be decorated with additional sugar, icing, sprinkles, or a combination of these. Decorative shapes and figures can be cut into the rolled-out dough using a cookie cutter.

The sugar cookie as we know it today was created by Protestant settlers in the Nazareth colony of Pennsylvania in the 1700s. They bake their cookies in the shape of a keystone, the state's symbol.

When word started spreading throughout Europe in the 17th century about these tasty desserts, and later when they were introduced to the Americas, some interesting terms were employed to describe these small treats. Fun names like jumbles, crybabies, and plunkets. These early cookies morphed into gimblettes in France and cimbellines in Italy.

  gimblettes

 cimbellines

Jumbles were the earliest form of sugar cookies. 

These were dry and not very enjoyable. However, people used them as Christmas ornaments. They would cut out these sugar cookies into different shapes and hang them on their trees.

A side note here: When my children were small, I would make sugar cookies with frosting and sprinkles and hang them on the tree. One evening as I went to turn off the lights, I noticed a discernible bite had been taken on many of the cookies on the lower branches. Come to find out, my three-year-old son had been sampling the cookies while he played nearby.

Victorian America believed adding spices to cookies could overly excite the digestive system, especially for growing children. It was deemed not only unhealthy but potentially immoral. 

For family teas and children's treats, women still needed something they could bake easily and inexpensively, without a lot of fuss, and something very plain. Cookies fit the bill perfectly. 

By the 1870s, plain cookies were common weekday fare in middle-class homes, and with a glass of milk made perfect snacks for children, or even a quick nutritious supper so children could be packed off to bed before a dinner party. If a mother wanted to make her babies' cookies even more nutritious, she might add chopped peanuts or oatmeal. Hence, peanut cookies and oatmeal cookies began as health food. And here you thought they were dessert!

What the mothers did not add was flavoring. Possibly a hint of nutmeg, which could be grated, or a squeeze of lemon, but nothing more. Even when vanilla extract became widely available in the 1880s, cooks rarely added it to "cookies", which seem to have been plain by design. The name "sugar cookie" seems to have caught on by the end of the 19th century. 

Sugar cookies are simple to make and delicious to eat, making them a popular choice for Christmas cookies for Santa Claus and other family traditions.

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