YES!!! I ACCEPT ALL COOKIES!!! IT’S OK (sort of)!!!
If you haven’t figured this out by now, I spend a lot of time on the Internet…doing research for the blog, reading the news, shopping, you name it! And more and more I am being asked to (forced to?) “accept cookies” on websites.
(An aside: while I busy myself on the internet, Andy busies himself trying to find the meaning of life by doing nothing. See today’s Andy’s Corner – if you’re not too busy.)
Our Brooklyn son was just here visiting (and working from “home”) for 2 weeks; he’s our tech authority, so asking about “cookies” was high on my list for him. But before he arrived I read this – badly titled – article in The Atlantic: Slouching Toward ‘Accept All Cookies’. Here’s a slightly-disturbing excerpt:
Even if not all of our information goes toward selling ads, it goes somewhere. It is collected, bought, sold, copied, logged, archived, aggregated, exploited, leaked to reporters, scrutinized by intelligence analysts, stolen by hackers, subjected to any number of hypothetical actions—good and bad, but mostly unknowable. The only certainty is that once our information is out there, we’re not getting it back.
How did the word “cookie” ever get used for this annoying information-stealer? Lou Montulli, a young engineer at Netscape, coined the term around 1994.
Montulli writes, “I had heard the term “magic cookie” from an operating systems course from college. The term has a somewhat similar meaning to the way Web Cookies worked and I liked the term “cookies” for aesthetic reasons. Cookies was the first thing I came up with and the name stuck.“
Where did “magic cookie” originate? Maybe from the comic strip, Odds Bodkins, published in the SF Chronicle from 1969-70:
Once you’ve decided to accept cookies – consequences be damned – you need a cookie to accept. And we’ve got a winner!
Logically, my shared cookie recipe would have been for “Magic Cookies” (which is actually a very popular cookie recipe), but I ventured further.
I searched for “the most popular cookie recipe,” and the first one that came up, one that “tops them all” with over 7000 “likes” was from allrecipes.com – for Mrs. Sigg’s Snickerdoodles. Since our two grandsons (the last one just left home to begin his freshman year at UC Santa Cruz…sigh) have always been Snickerdoodle lovers, it seemed apropos to share my favorite snickerdoodle cookie recipe with you. Mine comes from the River Road Recipes cookbook, 1974 edition, published by The Junior League of Baton Rouge. And, would you believe, it’s almost identical to Mrs. Sigg’s! I hope you find them “acceptable.”
Snickerdoodles
- 1 c butter (2 4-oz cubes), softened
- 1 1/2 c sugar
- 2 eggs
- 2 tsp vanilla
- 2 3/4 c flour
- 2 tsp cream of tartar
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 3/4 tsp Diamond kosher salt
For rolling the dough balls:
- 1/4 c sugar
- 4 tsp cinnamon
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
Beat sugar, butter, shortening, eggs, and vanilla in a large bowl until smooth and creamy.
Whisk flour, cream of tartar, baking soda, and salt together in a separate bowl. Gradually mix dry ingredients mixture into the wet ingredients just until combined.
Chill the dough (for at least several hours or even overnight); let the dough sit out for an hour or so when you’re getting ready for baking.
Shape dough into walnut-sized balls, a scant 2 T each.
Make cinnamon-sugar: Combine sugar and cinnamon in a small bowl or zip-top plastic bag.
Place dough balls in cinnamon-sugar and roll or shake until coated. Place 2 inches apart on ungreased baking sheets.
Bake in the preheated oven until lightly browned but not too hard, 8 to 10 minutes.
Remove from the oven and immediately transfer to wire racks to cool.
I learned about snickerdoodles from Frankie. They are, as practically everyone else already knew, delicious. I see that Ann’s recipe uses all butter for the fat. Frankie uses half butter and half Crisco. (Of course, Crisco is the brand name. I learned a few years ago that after my 2nd great grandfather returned to Sweden shortly after 1900, he started a business making “artificial lard.” I then understood better why brand names are invented. I do not know whether his product was hydrogenated; I do know that Crisco once was but is no longer. I don’t know how they make it stay solid at room temperature, now. But I digress.) My mom didn’t make snickerdoodles but she did make cookies, and in the sort of cookie that the snickerdoodle is, she always used only Crisco. I assume that was an economy measure.
But my sense of what constitutes a good cookie developed while eating those made with Crisco. I like cookies that break when you bite them. Soft cookies, cookies that will bend without breaking, or (God forbid) cookies that are intentionally made to be gooey on the inside are anathema to me. For me, some types of cookie have to be left out for a few days to dry and crisp up a bit before they are fit for eating. Frankie’s snickerdoodles were great but I never liked her chocolate chip cookies because they were too bendy. I finally figured out that this was because she made them with butter. I’m sure there are gourmands that can distinguish the flavors, but for me it is all about texture.
Do the experiment. Make a batch of snickerdoodles using Ann’s recipe here and another in which you have substituted Crisco (or another brand of solid vegetable shortening–Kroger house brand is only about a third the cost of Crisco) for the butter. If you want to put a fine point on it, make another batch with half of each fat. And though I have never tried it, I reckon that lard would make a great cookie (as it does with biscochitos)–what is more, lard has less cholesterol than butter!
You’re spot on, David! I actually tweeked both recipes by substituting all butter. Mrs. Sigg would have you use half butter and half “shortening” and the River Road recipe would have you use all shortening (Crisco would be commonly used, I’m sure). But I’m a butter lover – and not a Crisco/lard lover, so I’ll pick flavor over texture any day.