HOME WEB NEWS IMAGES CLASSIFIEDS YELLOW PAGESPOLLS - SURVEYS WIKI COUNTRIES PHOTOS US UK INDIA
Cities Stocks Weather Movies Coupons Travel Blogs Health Horoscope Maps ASIA EUROPE Classifieds Yellow Pages
|
 2
|
This article is about the food. For the computer term, see HTTP cookie. For other uses, see Cookie (disambiguation).
In the United States and Canada, a cookie (or cooky) is a small, round, flat cake. In most English-speaking countries outside North America, the most common word for this is biscuit; in many regions both terms are used, while in others the two words have different meanings—a cookie is a plain bun in Scotlandhttp://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9026125/cookie, while in the United States a biscuit is a kind of quick bread not unlike a scone.
Contents |
Its name derives from the Dutch word koekje or (informal) koekie which means little cake, and arrived in the English language through the Dutch in North America. It spread from American English to British English where biscuit is still the more general term.
Cookies are most commonly baked until crisp or just long enough that they remain soft, but some kinds of cookies are not baked at all. Cookies are made in a wide variety of styles, using an array of ingredients including sugars, spices, chocolate, butter, peanut butter, nuts or dried fruits. The softness of the cookie may depend on how long it is baked.
A general theory of cookies may be formulated this 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 base (in the case of cakes called "batter"Merriam-Webster\'s Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition. Merriam-Webster, Inc.: 1999.) as thin as possible, which allows the bubbles – responsible for a cake\'s fluffiness – to form better. In the cookie, the agent of cohesion has become some form of oil. Oils, whether they be in the form of butter, egg yolks, vegetable oils or lard are much more viscous than water and evaporate freely at a much higher temperature than water. Thus a cake made with butter or eggs instead of water is far denser after removal from the oven.
Oils in baked cakes do not behave as soda in the finished result. Rather than evaporating and thickening the mixture, they remain, saturating the bubbles of escaped gases from what little water there might have been in the eggs, if added, 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 sink into it.
Cookie-like hard wafers have existed for as long as baking is documented, in part because they deal with travel very well, but they were usually not sweet enough to be considered cookies, by modern standards[1].
Cookies appear to have their origins in 7th century AD Persia, shortly after the use of sugar became relatively common in the region[2]. They spread to Europe through the Muslim conquest of Spain. By the 14th century, they were common in in all levels of society, throughout Europe, from royal cuisine to street vendors.
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 travelled 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 in the very first century of English settlement (the 1600s), although the name "koekje" arrived slightly later, with the Dutch. This became Anglicized to "cookie". Among the popular early American cookies were the macaroon, gingerbread cookies, and of course jumbles of various types.
The most common modern cookie, given its style by the creaming of butter and sugar, was not common until the 18th century[3].
Eight types of cookies
Cookies are broadly classified according to how they are formed, including at least these categories:
Six types of cookies
A basic biscuit (cookie) recipe includes flour, shortening (often lard), baking powder or soda, milk (buttermilk or sweet milk) and sugar. Common savoury variations involve substituting sugar with an ingredient such as cheese or other dairy products. Shortbread is a popular biscuit in the UK.
In the UK the term cookie often just refers to chocolate chip cookies or a variation (e.g. cookies containing oats, Smarties).
|
|
Look up Cookie in
Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Wikibooks Cookbook has an article on
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia
