This Is The Oldest Type Of Cookie In The World
In West Nyack, New York, on the 12th of July 2019, Frank Squeo and the organization Baking Memories 4 Kids collectively baked 6,018 cookies in one hour, breaking the world record, at least according to Guinness World Records. The largest cookie in the world goes to the Immaculate Baking Company for having created an 8,120 square-foot chocolate chip beauty in Flat Rock, North Carolina, in May 2003 (via Guinness World Records). The honor for the Tallest Cookie Tower in the world, per Guinness, also belongs to the United States, the Girl Scouts of Nassau County, who stacked up 22,800 cookies 6 feet 1/8 inch high in 2010.
As if there were any room for doubt that cookies are as US American as peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, even Mariah Carey recently hopped on the cookie bandwagon. Her cookie brand is, thus far, offering up Chocolate Chunk, Triple Chocolate Chunk, Heath Bar, Lemon Cooler, and Spiced Oatmeal Raisin varieties. Shockingly, the honor medal for "the first cookie in the world" does not belong to the United States or even to the continent of North America.
This is how the first cookies came into being
History can't tell us if the first cookies were cinnamon-inspired or chocolate chip. It hasn't let on yet if they were circular, crescent-shaped, or squares. But we do know where the first cookies came from and why. Right around the time that (per Oxford Reference) Irish monasteries were distinguishing between capital and lower case letters, and the Viking were developing faster ships for more effective North Atlantic raids, Persians were using the first documented windmills, and their bakers were cooking little test cakes.
According to What's Cooking America, these test cakes, essentially small amounts of cake batter cooked in the oven in order to ensure the precision of the oven's temperature, were the first cookies to grace planet Earth. By 1596, they'd made their way to the UK, where a cookbook, Goode Huswife's Jewel, listed a recipe for "Fine Cakes," a type of shortbread cookies made with flour, butter, egg yolks, sugar, cloves, and saffron.