Discover the sweet legacy of Cowboy Cookies: A 1940s chocolate delight
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Chocolate: A global history is an essential guide for writers, researchers and food afionados about the long winding story of how chocolate travelled from the early Americas to the present day. Authors Sarah Moss and Alexader Badenoch write that evidence of cocoa has been found from the Olmec-era, pre-Classic Maya sites in Belize.
The book explores how colonisers brought cocoa to India, why it became a symbol of indulgence and came to be regarded as an aphrodisiac despite no conclusive proof. The book was released last month by Pan Macmillan, and here’s an excerpt of a recipe with a side of history. Chocolate chip cookies have become synonymous with America, though as with so many national traditions, they are a relatively recent invention.
The first ones, and the product they now contain, were famously developed in the 1930s by Ruth Wakefield of the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts in partnership with Nestlé. In spite of their novelty, their connection with the Inn spoke of quaint, colonial New England tradition. The following recipe, the ‘Cowboy Cookie’, shows a further adaptation of the chocolate chip cookie into us national fantasy, with the addition of oatmeal somehow adding connotations of frontier life.
They have been the Badenoch family recipe since grandmother Edith Badenoch spotted it in a women’s magazine in the late 1940s. It is an economical recipe very much of its time – it’s hard to imagine a recipe these days leading off with shortening. The ‘cowboy’ moniker also proved useful in persuading children who were sceptical about having their cookie recipe stretched with oatmeal.
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