Stuff You Should Know - Cookies! Cookies! Cookies!

Episode Date: December 30, 2021

No, we didn’t find another international distress signal we forgot to mention in our Mayday! Short Stuff, we’re just that jazzed about our episode on cookies. Are they even better than cakes? It��s up to you to listen and decide! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Brian over there and this is Stuff You Should Know, The Delishadish.

The Delishadish, if you hear my dogs barking, I'm sorry, they will not shut up. I really don't hear them. Well, I can't see them either. I know, I can hear them always. They're very barky. That's the shell tea in them. Yeah, we house out our friend's dog, you know, Scotty. Scotty's dog, Benny, came over for two weeks. And they're like best friends. You know, Benny, they kind of just co-exist. Oh, really? Okay. We kind of joke that he didn't know how to be a dog. Benny learned how to be a dog while he was here. Oh, yeah.

A little bit, being around our guys for two weeks. But Scotty got married, by the way, so congratulations Scotty. Oh my gosh, congratulations Scotty. I got to send him like an ice cream maker or something. And I got to officiate my first wedding, which was fun. What is going on? Yeah, I really, really enjoyed it, quite an honor. So that explains why you went through catechism. That's right. Yeah, so they got married, went on their honeymoon for two weeks. We had Benny, but I don't know why I started with that. Oh, Benny doesn't bark because Benny doesn't know

how to be a dog, but he learned how to bark while he was here. Man, that's not something you want your dog to learn. Because I have the bark in his dogs all the time. He said, oh, that's that's that. Okay, I've heard of that before. That's fascinating. Let me try. But there's nothing to do with cookies. No, but everything henceforth in this episode will have to do with cookies. Yeah. And I'm baking cookies tonight, by the way. Thank you. I, yes, restarting researching this, I was like, I'm baking cookies too.

And I want to give a huge shout out to Sally's Baking Addiction, who's brown butter chocolate chip cookie recipe is hands down the finest example of a chocolate chip cookie I've ever encountered in my life. Oh yeah? Yes. I mean, like days later, still chewy, amazing stuff. And it's worth the little extra effort in making brown butter. Just totally worth it. I can't overstate how good that recipe is. So you're not one of those weirdos that likes a good crisp chocolate chip cookie? It's a little bit crispy on the edges, a little bit chewy in the middle. It's, it's a balance of everything. But I can go either way. It's pretty,

it's got to be like a pretty lousy chocolate chip cookie for me to not want it, you know? Yeah, I'll take a crispy one, but boy that the fresh out of the oven kind that like folds down like a hot slice of New York pizza. Yes, dude. I actually went and purchased actual cow's milk to drink with while I ate these cookies. They were, it was that special. Whole milk? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, there were like chunks of fat just knocking around at the top of the milk bottle. There's, we're going to talk a lot about the cookies we like and don't like in here and what makes certain cookies great, of course, but I guess we should just go a little bit with the history and that the fact that a cookie is, you know, it's sort of like a cake, but the ratio of

ingredients is different in that with a cake, you end up with what's called batter and with cookie, you end up with what's called dough because of the ratio of your ingredients. Yeah. And also sometimes the ingredients themselves can differ, but if there's any other baked good that a cookie resembles most closely, it's probably a cake. In fact, I think the Cambridge and Collins dictionaries both define cookies as sweet, usually round flat cakes, which it seems sensible, but when you really dig into it, you're like, this actually doesn't fully hold up. Yeah. A cookie's a cookie. Yeah, because a cake, if you want to get, you know, jiggy with it, a cookie is its own thing. You hold a cookie with, you eat it with your hand. It's a self-contained

thing. A cookie is just one cookie and you can eat multiple cookies, but a cake is like one big unit that you cut into subunits called slices and usually eat it with a fork. So a cookie is not a cake and don't call it that ever again. Right. Unless it's a cupcake, also not even close to a cookie. That's right. But you do eat that with your hand, which kind of undermines that whole idea that a cookie is just a dessert you eat with your hand. It's a hand cake. I guess so, but isn't that really a cupcake, not a cookie? Well, no, that's what I'm saying. A cupcake is a hand cake. Oh, okay. Gotcha. Well, then we're on the same page finally. It's also not a bread, even though you might hear gingerbread or shortbread. Bread, as we know. And, you know,

cookies kind of come from all of this tradition of bread baking and biscuit making and stuff like that in a way. But gingerbreads and shortbreads, they don't have leavening agents like bread does. They're not going to rise like a bread is supposed to rise. And flour, bread flour, has got usually more gluten going on in it. Yeah. I mean, like if you look at cookie dough and then you look at bread dough, it's like two totally different things. Yeah, two different things. So not really a bread, not really a cake. You might say a pastry. It's a pastry. No, wrong again, because pastries at their base usually have some sort of flour, some sort of fat, and then water. I didn't see water. Yeah. I looked up a bunch of pastry recipes,

croissants and danishes. Water. I didn't see water in any of them. Put water in all of them. None of them had water in their recipe. It's implied in the recipe. Just work with that. Okay. All right. It's so universally known that you put water in pastries that they don't even include it in the recipe. The one recipe I did say that I saw that had water was a bear claw. Really? Yeah, like a bear claw. A croissant doesn't have water in it. Not the recipes I saw. That's really interesting. So a lot of people do say cookies are a type of pastry. I've seen elsewhere that that's not the case. No, it's a cookie. So I came up with the definition of cookies if I may share it myself, Chuck. Sure. A cookie is quote, and I'm quoting myself here, so I don't

know if it's right to actually say quote, a usually small, often round, usually flat, handheld dessert consisting of at least flour, a fat like oil or butter, and sugar. That, friends, is probably the greatest definition of cookie anyone's ever put to paper. The only issue I would take is usually round because I've seen a lot of shaped cookies. But that's why I said usually. Okay. What would you say? Sometimes round, frequently round? I might bump that up to often. I said often round. I thought you said usually. No, usually small, often round, usually flat. Okay. All right, sure. Boy. I like it. Okay, great. So we've got the definition of cookies, and I appreciate you indulging me because I really did kind of wade through a lot of the

internet to put that together. But there was something in there that's really important, too, which is sugar. And you think, well, yeah, of course, sugar. Cookies are sweet. Well, there's other things you can sweeten cookies with besides sugar, like you got molasses cookies, you got honey cookies. There's a lot of different cookies you can make. But if you dig into those recipes, you're going to find they still use sugar. And sugar is an extremely important ingredient, as we'll see. A lot of people say basically cookies didn't exist until sugar came along. Yeah, depending on where you are in the world, they're going to call them different things. If you watch Ted Lasso, you're going to know they call them biscuits in England,

and also Australia. In Spain, they're geladas. Yeah. The Germans call them keks. I don't know what that Christmas cookie. I don't even know how to pronounce that. Well, you took German. You don't know. I was going to ask you. I don't know, man. That's five consonants to start the word. Please, chin. T-L-Z-C-H-E-N. I would say it's probably like Petschen or something. But again, no vowels in the beginning of that, in most of that word. Yes. What about Italy? Oh, you're talking about the biscotti?

Very nice. Yeah, which you can find wrapped in a little jar at your local coffee place. Yeah, I'm not a fan of biscotti. It really depends. But no, for the most part, I'm not. Which it's a good thing we're not alive in like the 14th or 15th century, because we wouldn't have had many options. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I get it. That almondy taste is fine. But if I'm going to burn calories on a cookie, it's not going to be a biscotti. I got you. So the word cookie itself comes from the Dutch who have the word. Cookje, K-O-E-K-J-E, means small or little cake once again.

Right. So there's a lot of different words for cookies. That's the point. But cookies are their own thing. And over thousands of years, people have said, these are great. I like this. I'm going to contribute to humanity's understanding of baking by creating this cookie and that cookie. And now finally, we're living in what I consider the pinnacle of the age of cookies, because I can't imagine we're going to come up with better cookies that aren't just variations of what we have now. I feel like we've been at all of the great cookies. And that really, if you dig into it, most of the greatest ones, the apex, the pinnacle of them, were created here in the good old U.S. of A.

Agreed. But not the first cookies, because we're a young country. And most people say that cookies have been around since Persia, around 7th century CE. They had sugar for a while, and they had been making cakes and things like that. You had to be, you know, pretty wealthy. And that's a sort of a repeated thing you'll see in here as far as the early days of sugar being available. You had to have pretty much a lot of money and be part of royalty or at least super wealthy to eat these sweet confections. But at some point, there was a Persian baker who said, all right, I got to test out. I'm making a cake. I want to see if this oven's ready. We don't have thermometers or anything like that.

So let me just throw a little bit of this, I guess, dough in there and see what happens. And it came out this little baby cake and tasted awesome. And so whatever accents the Persians might have used said, this is fantastic. Let me keep doing this. I've discovered a new thing. Yeah. They said, why don't I just make a batch of test cakes only? And that cookie was born. That's the story. It's not entirely clear if that's true. It's spread all over the internet. I'm not just in the copy-paste way. It does seem to be that food historians tend to think, like, that's possibly what happened. But even if that is true, it ignores a lot of the previous evolution that led to cookies that came before the Persians.

Yeah. And we kind of mentioned this early. It comes from the tradition of baking bread, of course, something that we've been doing for 14,000 years. But those have those leavening agents. The Mediterranean's used to honey. And they made these honey pastries for a long, long time. The Russians made these cookies called prionics. Something like that. Yeah. Have you ever had one? No, have you? I don't know. Okay. They're made from honey, rye flour, and berries. And those go back to 4th century BCE. And then we have our good old biscuits. Yeah, which are, they seem to kind of have evolved from the Romans who created something called rusk, which is, you know what you don't like about

biscotti? Yeah. Take away anything even remotely likable about biscotti and you've got rusk. It has a hard tech, right? It was a hard tech, like the Navy's adopted and uses hard tech. And the reason that I think it was initially created was because the Roman soldiers who were going further and further afield, conquering all these different lands, they were supplied with this rusk as rations because what they would do is they would bake bread and then they would cut the bread into pieces and they would bake it again, which would remove almost all of the water content, all the moisture content from it. And you'd still have the nutrients, but none of the moisture, which means that it would stay for or keep for a very long time.

Like it wouldn't mold because it didn't have any water to create mold. Yeah. I mean, when you hear that story, you're like, why would they purposely just keep baking it and making it taste worse and worse? But it was just a necessity for rations. It was like preserving it. Yeah. And there's a name for that baking process, right? That's right. Biscotto from Italian means twice baked and that's where you get biscotti. Yeah. Not only is that where you get biscotti, Chuck, that's also where you get biscuits with the UK and Australia and New Zealand and a few other places referred to their cookies as biscuits. That's a derivation of biscotto. That's right. Pretty neat.

This is making me nothing but hungry. That's okay because there's plenty of cookies in your future. I can see it now. And I also see Chuck in our future an ad break happening this minute. That's very nice. That's all that coming. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't

have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikar and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might

not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so as we said, most food historians who think about these kind of things say, yeah, it was Persia. Persia is the place where cookies were kind of invented. And the reason you can't really argue with that is because if you are of European ancestry or live in a country that was founded through European colonization, there's a pretty good chance that all of the cookies that you've ever been exposed to came after the introduction of sugar and cookies and spices by the Persians to the Europeans through the Crusades. That's right. The Crusades happen. And anytime there's a conquering nation, one thing is for sure going to happen. And they are going to spread, they're going to find all the

delicious, wonderful things that that culture does. And they're going to steal them and take them back to their homelands. And that's how things spread throughout the world. And that's what happened with cookies. Yeah, and sugar. That's right. So it started in these Arab countries. And they said, let's bring back the ginger and cinnamon and cardamom and the sugar and all this delicious stuff. And let's start making our own cookies. Yeah. And then one of the reasons why all of this stuff was in Persia at the time, Chuck, is not just because the Persians had already started cultivating sugar. They had easy access to it, but they had access to things like ginger, too, like you said, which came from Asia or East Asia, I should say. And the reason that they had

access to this is because they were pretty well located along the Silk Road. But Europe and especially Western Europe was located very far off of the Silk Road. So even though this stuff was pretty commonly traded further East, you could not get it in Europe unless you were one of the most fabulously wealthy people on the planet at the time. Yeah. And as time crept on a little bit, there was a little more access to things like sugar, but it was still kind of like a special occasion thing. You didn't necessarily have to be super wealthy, but it wasn't like all of a sudden the working class of Europe was all of a sudden just baking cookies all the time. But that did give birth to a tradition, which is if it's a special occasion thing,

like, oh, I don't know, Christmas time, then that became a tradition is making cookies and handing out cookies to neighbors because you're not going to bake a bunch of cakes and deliver 35 cakes to your neighbors because that's a waste. But what you could do, like our old friend, Mona Collantine, used to do with us, which stopped. I don't think she listens anymore anyway. She'll never hear this, but it was really nice. Like, I mean, maybe 10 or 12 different varieties every year, big box of them. It was great. It was great. But that's where that tradition comes from around Christmas time, on special occasions, baking batches of cookies and sharing them with friends and neighbors. Yeah, because they were splurging to show off for baby Jesus.

Sure. That's what you do. So one of the things I came across though was that a family in medieval Europe or middle age Europe, baking cookies around the holidays, were probably breaking the law because the trade guilds were really powerful at the time. And among those trade guilds were the baker's guilds who had managed to get laws enacted that said, you can't even bake for yourself in your own home. You have to buy your baked goods from a baker who's a member of a trade guild, a trained baker. And apparently everybody said nuts to that or not. We're not going to listen to that. And over the course of a century or two, that kind of enforcement went away because who doesn't want to bake in their own home? Yeah, I mean, I'm a union guy, but I draw the line at

some point. Yeah, baking in your own home is that line. Yeah. And it literally became the will of the people. And they were just like, no, no, no, we're not doing this anymore. We got to bake at home. They were some of the first recipes and some of the first cookbooks in North America were cookie recipes. Yeah, not just that. Like even earlier than that, there was cookbooks that came out in like the 16th century, the early 17th century. And they started having cookie recipes in them and cake recipes in them. And the reason why, one of the reasons why was because the European powers had started to colonize places where you could grow sugar, because people had gotten a little taste of sugar and the demand was so great that they went out and actually conquered new areas

so that they could grow sugar, which lowered the prices of sugar, which meant that the average household was way more likely to be able to afford it and say like the 16th or 17th or probably 18th century. And that as a result led to these cookbooks coming up. Like there's one called the Good Huswifes Jewel, Chuck. Did you say housewife? No, huswifes. What is that? Just I guess a variation of... I guess an old-timey English way to put it. H-U-S wife. But if you look at, there's a recipe for fine cakes in there. And if you look at it, you're like, how did anybody produce anything like this? We expect extremely precise recipes these days when you open a cookbook. Well, for baking especially. Yeah, because I mean, it's a science

experience, a chemical reaction you're doing with baking. Cooking is a little more like an art, right? So with the Good Huswifes Jewel, with the recipe for fine cakes, you could find ingredients like take two or three yolks of eggs in a good quantity of sugar. Yeah. And I think each one was signed like good luck. Yeah, figure it out. Yeah, but apparently people got it right enough at the time that these things really started to take off and people would bake cookies more and more. Yeah, we mentioned shortbreads earlier. That came from Scotland. And the name shortbread might sound a little weird, but it was, it was sort of a hybrid. It was, it basically means crumbly cookie. Yeast was swapped out for butter and sugar was added in when they had this leftover

bread and these hard biscuits. And it became shortbread and they used shortmet crumbly. So that's where the crumbly comes from. And the, there was a tax on biscuits. And then the Scottish Heritage site says that they called it bread to get around the tax on biscuits. So that's why that's the only reason it's called shortbread. They're like, that's a cookie. It basically should have been called crumbly cookie. Exactly. Yeah. Somebody, some tax collectors, like, that's a cookie. They said, no, it's a, it's a bread. It's a shortbread. Be quiet. Yeah. That got me looking into the etymology of how the cookie crumbles. Oh, yeah. And it's, it was one of those sort of disappointing ones where they just said like mid, like 1940s, 1950s America.

Not Scotland in the 18th century? Yeah, it couldn't be traced back to like a specific person. And basically they, some people said it might have come from like Salavie in France. But I just, I just love that line in the apartment. Billy Wilder is the apartment. He says it a couple of times. He says, that's how it crumbles cookie wise. Instead of, that's how the cookie crumbles. Who said that? Was it Jack Lemon? Jack Lemon said that. Yeah. That's just a nice little turn of phrase by Billy Wilder. Good stuff. Man, I ended up watching Casablanca the other night. It just happened to be on and I caught it toward the beginning. It really is maybe the greatest movie ever made. It is amazingly good.

I liked it during my James Dean like Humphrey Bogart teenage phase. But as an adult watching it, I haven't seen it in many, many years. It's just, it's astounding how good it is, the acting, the writing, directing, the lighting. It's crazy. I need to do it. Chuck, you will like it. It is such a good movie. I can't imagine anybody's ever seen Casablanca and been like, that sucked. Probably so. Have you seen the apartment? No, I never have. All right. Well, I'll trade you. Got to see that. That was on Movie Crush. That was our good friend Scott Aukerman. That was his movie pick. The apartment or Casablanca? The apartment. And Scott is such a pro and such a sweetheart. He rewatched the movie and

like reread like multiple chapters of Billy Wilder's book in preparation for that episode. That's what, like what a pro he is. And designed an original movie poster for it. Yeah. He signed for me. That's nice. That sounds like Scott Aukerman. Yeah. So all right. Shortbread is where we were, probably cookies. Well, we were talking, I think what the point we were trying to get across is that like the Europeans had like a bonanza, a golden age of cookie development after sugar became widely available. Say starting in the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s. And so you've got shortbread created in Scotland. The macaroon was created way earlier in Italy, but it spread its way to France and then England got its hands on it.

The macaroon. Right. The macaroon. Different. The coconutty kind that's crispy on the outside and very chewy on the inside. And it's kind of like a ball almost. Yeah. Not a fan. Oh, I like them. I like them. I like a macaron. I like a macaron too. I don't really discriminate. Like it has to be, again, it's got to be a pretty bad cookie. Usually it's got to be a mass produced industrialized cookie. If somebody cooked it at home, I'm probably going to like it. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm with you. And then gingerbread cookies too, Chuck. They made their first appearance in the 15th century. Yeah. So we mentioned Greece coming over from China, but the cookie itself, I believe, started in Greece about 2400 BCE and medieval England preserved

ginger was what gingerbread was called. But that's not like the dessert that we're talking about. The dessert is, you know, is that delicious sort of molasses, gingery cookie that eventually they started making into people shapes because of Queen Elizabeth I, when dignitaries would visit, they would, she would, she would have cookies shaped like them in tribute. And that's how they came to be made. I think that was Terry Gilliam you just did actually. I think, didn't we, on a Christmas episode, do something on gingerbread houses or gingerbread men? Yeah. I think we did. It may have been our live one that we did in 2018. Oh. I'll have to look. Remember, we've got the handy list of everything we've ever done on Christmas episodes.

That's right. It's very nice of you to keep up with that. Yeah. So you want to take a break and then talk about cookies coming to their rightful place where they will truly enter their true golden age America? USA. Yes. That's right. We should insert like a bald eagle scream here. Oh man, we should. We'll be right back. me in this situation. If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh God. Seriously. I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Chitikler. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars,

if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop? But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So one of the reasons, all the people check who are like, stop talking about how great America

and its cookies are. One of the reasons why our cookies are so great is because America has always been a melting pot of immigrants coming from all these different places. And one of the things that all these immigrants brought with them were their cookies and their cookie ideas, their cookie traditions. And all that stuff got blended together and inspired people to come up with new stuff too. And now we have even better cookies, but they improved upon the traditions of the immigrants who came here in the first place. That's right. And depending on where you go in the United States today, you're going to see traces of those original immigrant populations and the cookies that they brought by probably how popular the

cookies in that region still are today. If you go to the Midwest, maybe, I don't know, Michigan, Ohio, you might eat a pizzel. I think it's Pizzel. Pizzel? I think so, yeah. Sister, I remember people calling it in Toledo. Okay, they're probably like, oh my god, Chuck. He screwed that one up. It's like a pizza's a round flat thing. A pizzel is like a little round flat thing, basically. All right. But it's not like a pizza. Have you ever had one? Yeah, I think so. It's like a little waffle, but not a strewwaffle. Yes, no, it's like a waffle. It's a little thicker than a strewwaffle part. It's almost like a crispier doughy funnel cake that's much thinner and flatter. And it's often flavored with anise. And it can be really

good, but it can also be really dry and not good. Yeah, but it's made in a little waffle-y iron mold. Yes, I think it's one of those things where you really want to eat a pizzel fresh out of the iron. What I call it, a pizzle? Pizzle. Yeah, that's not right. I knew that wasn't right. It's a pizzle cookie. I believe that the Scottish shortbreads eventually became teacakes here in the South, which can be a thing, evidently. I haven't had a lot of teacakes, but I think it's like part of the old sort of Southern tradition. Yeah, and like you said too, Chuck, I mean like Americans were cool with cookies from the earliest stages of the country. The first ever cookbook that was written by an American printed in America was printed in 1796. It's

called American Cookery by Amelia Simmons, and she had a bunch of different cookie recipes in there. She did. She had a few gingerbread cookie recipes. I think one, reportedly, is by George Washington's mother, and all kinds of fun names, Kinka Woodles, or how about a Tangle Breach? I like that one. That's pretty good. What about plunkets or crybabies? Crybabies sounds pretty good. It is, but that's also the name of that little, um, you remember the Sugar Daddy bar? The Sugar Daddy bar. It's like a very, very chewy. I don't know what it's supposed to be. Okay, so they cut those into little kind of rabbit poop size pieces, and I think coated them with chocolate and called those sugar babies. No, they are not

coated in chocolate, which I think is a failing. So that's what I always associate with crybabies, even though they're called sugar babies. Okay. Either that or that Johnny Depp John Waters movie of the 90s. Yeah, crybaby. Or the 80s. Jolly Boys. That was another cookie name for Metal Cookbook. Those were kind of fun. Snickerdoodle not in there. No, and apparently Snickerdoodle has some sort of German derivation, but I'm not sure about that. One thing I found research in Cookies Chuck is that there's a lot of contradictory information out there. Sure. You just kind of have to choose. We invented this. Yeah, we invented it. Well, the Snickerdoodle is sort of a play on the sugar cookie, as is the ice sugar cookie, which is the only kind of sugar cookie I like.

Oh, yeah. It's the iced one. You don't like Snickerdoodles, huh? I'd consider that a Snickerdoodle. I'm just talking about a standard sugar cookie. I like a Snickerdoodle. Sure. Okay. Yeah, I like it. And it's a sugar cookie, but I meant like the plain white sugar cookies. Yeah, no, it's almost like you're kind of like, well, you didn't finish. There's no frosting on here. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, a little, if you're ever just hard up for something like that, just some like regular break and bake sugar cookies and like a tub of vanilla frosting is all you need to just recreate a world of wonder for yourself. But yeah, you said the Snickerdoodle and the sugar cookie, I think, came from German immigrants, the Moravians,

Pennsylvania, very famous for their stars as well. We have a Moravian starlight, which I'm a big fan of, but they were called Nazareth sugar cookies because of Nazareth, Pennsylvania. Yeah, or some people call them Amish sugar cookies. And some people say, well, why wouldn't they just call them Moravian sugar cookies? Because that would be too confusing. So we can also thank our friends, the Amish or the Moravians, the group who moved to North Carolina for inventing the Moravian spice cookie, which is a very crispy, very thin little cookie made with molasses and ginger and cinnamon that you have around the holidays. Yeah, it's close to gingerbread, but crispier and thinner. Yes. And that was an American made cookie as well. So both the sugar

cookie and the Moravian spice cookie were invented by the same sect of German Protestants who arrived in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, respectively, mind blowing. Very cool. We got to talk about the state cookie of New Mexico, the bizcochito. This was brought in by the Spanish colonists, sort of co-developed by the Pueblo people there in, you know, areas like New Mexico, what we now call New Mexico. Yeah. And bizcocho means cakes in Spanish. So bizcochito means little cakes. Yeah. And bizcocho should be like, oh yeah, it's kind of like bizcoto, which it is. It's derived from that as well. Like a biscotti. Yeah, exactly. They're all cognates. I have not had a bizcochito cookie yet in my life. I haven't either. But I play into

cinnamon and anise sounds like a very winning combination. Yeah, I looked them up on the internet. They look tasty. They do. They definitely do. But then I propose that it's maybe the most famous cookie of all. Would you agree or disagree? Am I over overstating things? No, I think the chocolate chip cookie is the, at least from our view, the most famous cookie of all time. Okay. So that cookie is one of those few origin stories that you can say definitively, this person did this, and this is when they did it. And no, there's not some other person out there who says that they were the ones who did it. And there's some evidence that they may have done it three years earlier. That's not the case. The chocolate chip cookie was invented by a woman

named Ruth Wakefield in Whitman, Massachusetts, possibly in 1930, maybe 1931. Apparently she didn't remember exactly when she did it, but she is the person who invented the chocolate chip cookie. And what's awesome about it is she invented it by accident. And where was it? At the Toll House Inn. The Toll House Inn. There you are, everyone. She was baking. She needed a baker's chocolate. She didn't have any. That's that unsweetened chocolate that gives, you know, like fudge and cake, a lot of flavor and the color. And she said, I don't have any of that. So I got the semi-sweet chocolate. I'm going to chunk it up real good. And when she put it in there, she found that those chunks did not just melt and become a part of the entire cookie. They held their shape and they came out

like little chocolate chips because of that lower cocoa butter content and bing-bang-boom chocolate chip cookie. Yeah. And she served them anyway. I guess she tried one. It was like, this is pretty boss. And they became like an instant hit at the Toll House Inn. So it was called the Toll House Cookie. And I guess words spread enough that I don't know if she approached Nestle or Nestle approached her, but they struck a deal that they could print her recipe for Toll House cookies using semi-sweet chocolate chips on their bags of semi-sweet chocolate chips that her cookie recipe was now helping to move pretty good in exchange for a lifetime of free chocolate. Bad deal. She said, she apparently thought it was just fine. So she actually did

end up cashing in. She sold her, fully sold all of her rights to the Toll House cookie, what we call the chocolate chip cookie, to Nestle. I think, I don't remember exactly when she did that, but they had it until like 1983 and then lost the rights, Chuck. Yeah. I mean, I think at a certain point it was just like, sorry, this belongs to the world. Yeah. You can't own this anymore. I saw a 1978 poll that said that more people associated the term Toll House with cookies or chocolate chip cookies in general than they did with Nestle or any of its products. That was not the case for me. I always called chocolate chip cookies a chocolate chip cookie. Did you ever call them Toll House cookies? Nope. Chocolate chip cookies. That was a weird poll

or people who were polled in this weird poll were very weird back in 78. Agreed. Although, I don't remember, maybe we did say that one was seven. I just, I don't remember it at all. I mean, a TV commercial said it, but that didn't count. Yeah. But that was a commercial for the Nestle bag of chips. Yeah. They were Toll House chips. That's what I always thought of them as. Man, do you remember the Butterscotch chips? I would just eat an entire bag of those things by myself, just right out of the bag. Yeah. I mean, the peanut butter chips, butterscotch chips, if you throw a little, the plain M&Ms, those are all good variations, but your classic chocolate chip cookie is just a hands down winner.

Yeah. And in particular, Sally's baking addictions, brown butter chocolate chip cookie. America also birthed the peanut butter cookie and the brownie, the oatmeal raisin cookie. I get, can we skip to brownie real quick and talk about that? Sure. Bit of a pedantism. Yeah. Because I'm sure some people are brownies aren't cookies. Well, that's me. I just... Oh, really? Yeah. It's just, it's one of those things where it's just, it feels like a pedantic argument to call a brownie a cookie. Technically, it's a pan cookie, but to me a brownie is a brownie. Okay. And if someone comes up, I think it's the other way around,

is say, no, a brownie is a brownie is to say, no, no, technically brownies are cookies. Well, yeah. I mean, if anybody says it to you, you just say, hey, you want a brownie, and that just takes care of that. Exactly. Why talk about it? Just eat it. Right. But the point is this, is a brownie is, I'm just not letting this pass by, a brownie is a type of cookie, is a bar cookie in the same way that a lemon bar is a bar cookie, a Nanaimo is a bar cookie. I'm pretty sure I'm saying that right. And it's just a cookie where you take the batter and you build it, you bake it in a single mass and then cut it into squares rather than baking them individually. But it's still a cookie.

Not to me, it's not. That's fine. That's totally fine. I just, I couldn't not explain it further, but I don't... The consistency is different to me. The little flaky top is different. It's just all different. Okay. Well, let me ask you this, Chuck. What about a chocolate chip brownie that is nothing more than a square, slightly thicker chocolate chip cookie? No. Do you mean a pan baked chocolate chip cookie? Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's not a brownie. That's a pan baked chocolate chip cookie. But it looks exactly like a brownie. It's the same shape, but it has different consistency and doesn't have that flaky top. So to you, just the brownie is its own thing.

Yeah. Okay. What about a lemon bar? It's a lemon bar. Okay. I can get with you on both of those, actually, but... I mean, that's just, you know, again, it's a... This is a pedantic argument that no one should ever have. Those are my favorite kind. What you should do is just sit down, eat those cookies, eat those brownies, eat those bar brownie cookies, throw some ice cream on top, some hot fudge, some whipped cream. Put a lemon bar on there. I'm not a big lemon bar guy. Oh, I like them, but they have to be totally by themselves. You wouldn't mix that with anything. No. I'm not a big fan of lemon cookies either.

Like, lemony sweets aren't my favorite. I got you. I love them. I feel like how if you take your likes and my likes and my dislikes and yours likes and put us together, we form a fully formed whole person, you know? We would like everything. So, Chuck, there's a couple of other kinds of cookies we need to shout out real quick. The cutout cookie where you roll them out and cut them out, that's why they're called that. Like a Christmas sugar cookies are often cutout cookies. Those are fun. I don't love to eat those as much like a Christmas shaped cookie with the sprinkles on top. Not my favorite. I'm sort of a dropped cookie purist. Yeah, dropped cookies are kind of like a chocolate chip cookie where you like scoop them out by the spoonful and drop that

mound on there and they kind of spread and flatten out as they bake, producing a round flat dessert tree. That's right. And by the way, brownies, we know the etymology, or the etymology, what would it be? Just the origin story? What? Fanny Farmer in 1905 invented the brownie. There's a story that a housewife in Maine forgot baking powder and their chocolate cake and it became a brownie. And that's in like some cooking encyclopedias. Not true because that was in 1912 and Fanny Farmer's recipe was printed in 1905. Yeah, and Fanny Farmer actually did a lot more than just invent the brownie. She also is credited for inventing the oatmeal raisin cookie too. Oh, really? Yeah, she's very prolific. See, here's my deal. I listened to a judge,

John Hodgman, the other day, and Jesse Thorne, our friend and bailiff of that show, called Raisins a BS addition to any sweet treat, which I generally agree. But I like an oatmeal raisin cookie and I'm not the biggest raisin guy. A good one, for sure. But that's pretty much the limit of raisins in desserts, unless it's just a fistful of raisins. Great Clint Eastwood movie. They're really scraping the bottom of the barrel. So what about the icebox cookie? So those came along after the invention of the icebox, obviously, but usually you take the dough and you roll it into a log, chill it, and then you cut it into slices and those slices are baked as cookies. Yeah, if you look at a pinwheel cookie that

swirly shape comes because it's rolled up and chilled. Or the logs of ready to bake cookie dough you find in the dairy aisle. That's a nice box cookie, technically. I disagree because that's not rolled flat. That's just a big tube. So no, no, no, it's not rolled flat. A pinwheel cookie's not rolled flat either. It's rolled into a tube, a cylinder, and then you cut the cylinder into slices. No, no, no. It's rolled flat and then it's rolled. So it's got rings like the rings of the tree. I see what you're saying. I got you. I got you. Yeah, I think the final product and the fact that it's a tube in the fridge makes it a nice box cookie. All right. That's not just me saying that either. You got your classic sandwich cookie, which everything from an Oreo to a macaron,

to those great rits, peanut butter rits, chocolate dip things that Emily's grandmother used to make. Those are really good. Who, by the way, is turning 101 this year. I'm not on Facebook anymore, but Mary's turning 101 in a couple of weeks. Hey, you ditched Facebook, huh? Good for you, Jack. Yeah, I deleted my account. I was out of there. That is what they call mental health. I didn't miss it at all. No, did it take any kind of transition period for you? You know, the only thing I missed that was actually genuinely hard was the movie crush page and the movie crushers page. Those were awesome and it was a great community. It is a great community, I hope still. But that was the hardest part to leave because I really, really enjoyed my interactions

there. It was a very kind little corner of the internet. But having said that, it was all for my well-being. So I had to let that go even. Yeah. So anyway, Mary's 101 soon. Want to let the stuff you should know Army that. I'm glad that came up actually, because she's not doing the best here at 101, but she's hanging in there. Well, a super duper, hooper happy birthday to you, Mary. 101, that is amazing. 1920. That is really impressive. But back to sandwich cookies. You also got your stoop waffle. Yeah. I think I mentioned the macaron. Yeah. Get to Malamar's, get your moon pies. We've got Oreos. Yeah, it's classic. Apparently, the Whoopee Pie is the original sandwich cookie, and that we can thank our Amish friends for as well. Supposedly, the name came from Amish workers

on job sites going Whoopee when they opened their lunch pail and found a Whoopee Pie inside. Yeah. I like a Whoopee Pie. Just the cake, if it has too much cake to filling, it becomes a little cumbersome for me. It definitely has to be just right. But researching this, Chuck, it may be wonder if Oreos were meant to be like some sort of manufactured Whoopee Pie. Maybe, I will say this, the only Oreo worth eating is the double stuff. Do you like the golden kind or the chocolate kind or both? No, I don't try the variations. I like the regular. Okay. What about you? I like them pretty much all. There's only been a couple of weird Oreos that I was like, yeah, not this one. Okay. Because there's all kinds of crazy flavors now, right?

Yeah. The birthday cake and the rice crispy treat Oreos were pretty great. The birthday cake thing has infested every area of the sweet realm. Yeah. For good reason, though. I mean, you get some frosting in there. Well, that's pretty much it. That's an excuse to put frosting in something that wasn't otherwise there. Oh, I want cookies so bad. Or in the case of an Oreo, you're putting frosting inside of frosting and that is amazing. I got something else here. I know we got a few more little tidbits. Cookie dough. I tried to find out sort of the rise of eating cookie dough and it becoming a thing and no one really knows when it started to be a big thing. I mean, they think nostalgia obviously has a big

part in it with looking the better off the mixing things. But they said that this new generation like Gen Z has taken it to a new level and they in college towns, cookie dough is triple in sales what it is in a regular town, partially because dorms don't have ovens, but partially because the younger generation just eats this stuff up. Yeah, there's this is all safe to eat now. I know everyone thinks it's eggs, but it's usually the flour that causes problems. What? Yeah, it's bacteria in the flour. And so they said salmonella and eggs is really, if you take care of your eggs, it's really not much of a problem. Yeah, most eggs are pasteurized now. Yeah, well that too. But like if you buy the cookie dough

that you're allowed to eat in the grocery store, like just right out of the thing, like cookie dough for eating, it has got treated flour. It's called heat treated flour. That sounds healthy. Which means, yeah, they just bring the flour up to about 165 degrees Fahrenheit for a little while. And then that takes care of any bacteria. And then you can just eat cookie dough like it's going out of style. Crazy, I did not know that. Thank you for that one, man. That's a fact of the podcast right there. And the cookie dough ice cream that started in 1984 by Ben and Jerry's in their Vermont scoop shop. Yeah, that's good stuff. Apparently it was an anonymous suggestion on their suggestion board. Oh, really? Yeah. Man,

that was nice. So somebody really lost out on some big royalties. They left another anonymous suggestion saying, can I have a little bit of money for my idea? You got some other good facts here, don't you? Yeah, best selling cookie in the world. Chuck, what is it? Oh, geez, I don't know. Oreo. Oh, is it Oreo? It is, or at least in 2014, the latest I could find was. Okay. But I think that bears reminding, and I know we've talked about it before, that Oreo is actually the knockoff, that Hydrox was the original. And Oreo came along and knocked off Hydrox and then became the greatest selling cookie in the world. Oh, that's right. I love that story. I like this bit you have on Famous Amos too, the very

famous, famous Amos cookies. I don't think I knew this. Wally Amos was an agent, the first African-American agent at the William Morris Agency, and he would bake these cookies to give his acts to be like, hey, how about some cookies? You want to stay with me, right? And they were really popular and he spun it off and founded his own company. Yes. And then I got one more, Chuck. People leave cookies out for Santa, right? Sure. You'd think they'd be pretty old, but actually, apparently they've traced it back to the Great Depression in America. Santa cookies? Yeah, that they were teaching kids to show gratitude and appreciation for the gifts that they were getting. And that was,

some parents started that and that was where kids started leaving cookies out for Santa. That's what I saw. I saw it in multiple places. Yeah, they're very unlikely time. That's very nice. Yeah. So that's it for cookies, everybody. I think the only thing left to do is to go eat some cookies. You know how many people are going to bake cookies tonight? That's great. That was kind of the point. I wanted everybody to bake. And I also want to shout out some of our sources, the nibble, what's cooking America, and many, many, many others. Yum. And since I said many, many, many others and Chuck said yum, that means it's time for a listener mail. Well, what it's time for is to talk about Sketch Fest. Okay. Because we're returning to the live

stage, everybody. And we want to see you. It's a vaccinated only show. It is a masked show. We're going to do it as safely as possible. And this is on January 21st, the best comedy festival in the land. Yeah, we'll be at the Sydney Goldstein Theater and you can get tickets at sfsketchfest.com. And it'll be the first time in two years that we will have been on stage. So it's going to be fun to see for you guys one way or another, whether we bomb or not. That's one that will be great. It'll be a lot of fun. And I'm looking forward to it. I really miss getting on stage. So it's going to be great. So we'll see you guys January 21st, 2022. And Chuck, speaking of 2022, this is our last regular episode of 2021. So first I want to wish my

dear sweet wife, Yumi, very, very happy birthday today. She actually, I said, hey, which would you rather know more about? Contortionists or cookies? And she said cookies. So I dedicated this episode to her. And I think we should wish everybody out there a very, very happy new year in the hopes that 2022 is a really, really great year, don't you? That's right. Thanks for all the support, not only this year, but over all the years that allow us to have one of the best jobs in the world. It means everything to us, and y'all mean everything to us. And so thanks a lot. I hope you had a great, or at least a better 2021 than 2020. And maybe things will be even better next year.

Yeah. If you want to get in touch with us to tell us how great your new Zeeve was, you can send it in an email to stuffpodcast.iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Life, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe.

You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me, and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.