Favourite Cookies

Favourite Cookies - Level 4

North Americans are known for their "sweet tooth." This means that they like snacks with 

lots of sugar. Americans drink a lot of coffee, tea and hot chocolate, and usually they 
have something sweet with their drink. Cookies are one of America's favourite desserts. 
The word "cookie" comes from a Dutch word meaning "little cake." People from Europe 
brought their favourite recipes with them when they came to America. The English 
brought their custom of having tea in the afternoon. Usually with their tea they would 
have cakes or biscuits. Biscuits are usually hard wafers like, for example, ginger snaps. 
In fact, the Italian slang word for Englishman is "cake eater." 
In the early days, all cookies were homemade. But, in the late nineteenth Century, 
biscuits began to be manufactured in large quantities by machine. In 1912, the National 
Biscuit Company (Nabisco) in the U.S.A. introduced Oreo cookies. This cookie has a rich 
cr?e vanilla filling between two crispy chocolate wafers. This product was designed to 
meet the demand for an English-style biscuit. Oreos were good to dunk in a drink, to eat 
whole, to eat in parts, or to use in cooking. Oreos have become both America's and the 
world's favourite commercial cookie. New varieties of Oreos are added regularly to the 
original product. 
Although commercial biscuits like Oreos are very popular, many people prefer home-
baked ones. In fact, there is a whole line of commercial cookies called "home-style," 
which try to imitate homemade cookies. The most popular cookie in America can be 
either bought in a package or baked at home. These are chocolate chip cookies. 
Ruth and Kenneth Wakefield operated the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts. 
One day in 1930, Mrs. Wakefield ran out of baking chocolate for her baking cookies. She 
broke up a chocolate bar and added the pieces to her cookie mix. She expected that the 
chocolate bits would melt into the dough when she baked them. But they didn't. Soon 
chocolate chip cookies were being made commercially by adding small chunks of 
chocolate to regular chocolate cookie dough. Lots of people like to make their own by 
adding commercial chocolate chips to their dough. 
Now chocolate chip cookies are the most popular kind of cookie in North America. Over 
seven billion are eaten annually here. Half of all the cookies baked in American homes 
are chocolate chip cookies. 
Experiments in baking and packaging have led to new kinds of cookies. Recently, soft 
cookies have become very popular. Since they are packaged in foil, they can stay fresh 
and soft for many months. It seems likely that the love of cookies will be around for a 
long time.