Eat My Globe

Interview with Marissa Rothkopf Bates

Simon Majumdar (“SM”):

Hey everybody and welcome to a brand-new episode of Eat My Globe, a podcast about things you didn't know you didn't know about food. And I am delighted to have on my episode today, one of my favorite people. This lady writes about food for the New York Times, the Contrarian, Newsweek, and the New Jersey Monthly among others. She has a wonderful podcast which I've been on which is called The Secret Life of Cookies and has a fine Substack resume and community. She has also written a terrific book which is called The Secret Life of Chocolate Chip Cookies: Exciting New Ways to Enjoy Everyone's Favorite Dessert. It is this and the history in general of cookies that is something we want to discuss today. I really wrote an essay on my podcast, The History of British Biscuits. So now I wanted to let a real expert of the cookie explain the difference. As she says about herself, Marissa has a fancy graduate degree, I love this, from Cambridge University and earned her professional qualifications as a chef from the Institute of Culinary Education. Yet, she still gets nervous when asked to make a custard, as indeed do I. I am very, very pleased to introduce my chum, Marissa Rothkopf-Bates.

Marissa Rothkopf Bates (“MRB”):

Thank you so much for having me. I am truly delighted to be here. Thank you.

SM:

Oh no, I'm so pleased that you've been on because we've been trying to think of ways we could get you on and I think this is a perfect one.

MRB:

Perfect.

SM:

So first of all though, how are you doing? I haven't spoken to you for a little while.

MRB:

I'm doing really, really well. I'm doing very well. Thank you so much. I'm coming to you from my kitchen where I bake all my cookies.

SM:

Well, that's fantastic.

Before we go into the subject of cookies, what is going on in your life right now? Have you got any events? Have you got more of the podcasts? Have you got anything like that? That we could let our listeners know.

MRB:

Thank you for asking. I put out a weekly, sometimes bi-weekly sub stack at marissaroadkopf.substack.com, but there I put out a new recipe almost every week. And so at this point, having been on there for five years, I have a cache of like, I don't know, 250 recipes that I've been doing. And every couple of weeks I'll do a live interview, live podcast with a newsmaker or somebody who knows a lot about the news. And we talk about whatever's going on, but also about baking and cookies. It's a strange mixture, but it sort of works.

SM:

I think you do that and I think you do it really, really well, I have to say, because, you know, talking about cookies, I think draws away from otherwise impossible circumstances right now. But we won't talk about that.

MRB:

Mm-mm.

SM:

Now, let's get this straight, shall we? First of all, you tell us the difference between the American cookies and the British biscuits, because a lot of people, both in Britain and here, just say they're the same and they're, they're not, are they?

MRB:

I don’t, I don’t think they are. I think the British biscuit is its very own, very special, unique thing. I think a lot of people will say, I think people like to narrow it down and make people like black and white and not black and just black and white cookies, which is a whole other topic. People like to say British biscuits are crunchy and American cookies are soft, which is of course not true. Originally, that is the truth. Koekje, the word in Dutch that we get cookie from in this country that the Dutch, the nice Dutch people brought over for us, literally means cook and Dutch means soft cake. And so koekje means little soft cake, which you have to imagine like the word little soft cake. I just changed my name to little soft cake. It just sounds, it's like poetry to me. Anyway, so I think that's why people will say, American cookies are soft, but what's the most famous American cookie, right? We have the chocolate chip cookie in the, like the homemade version can be partly soft, but also crunchy. And then you have the Oreo, which the world over is known as a crunchy sandwich cookie. So.

SM:

Yeah, I went recently, I was in New York. And I went to Chelsea Market, which was the place Nabisco, I think. And that's where they brought the Oreo cookie to life, as it were. I just, and I, to be honest, when I went there for Food Network, which used to be there, I never realized that because I'd just run in, go to the studio and go out again because it was always so busy. So I love that.

MRB:

I worked in Chelsea market as well when I worked for Oxygen Network and it was such an amazing place to work. But for me, it was so exciting because I, to me, it was the Nabisco factory. And apparently when they changed over the building from being the factory to being really expensive, you know, place to work and live is...

SM:

Yes.

MRB:

. . . they had old pipes that still had molasses stuck in them as it had been for the past 80 years, you know, since they built it. Maybe they built it in 1915. So it was about, yeah, about 70 years. . .

SM:

Wow.

MRB:

. . . of old molasses because the trains used to carry the flour directly into the building from Pennsylvania, which is why we have the High Line, another American, another New York City, terrific tourist destination.

SM:

I love that, I love that. Anyway, you talk about cookies coming from this Dutch thing though, but when I talk about cookies as well, I always think about the Persian side of it as well because they, so do you know much about that?

MRB:

I know a little bit about it and that the Persians are where we, if we want to go back to like the, badly said, but like the Ur cookie.

SM:

Yeah.

MRB:

It would be to Persia. That's where we have our earliest known examples of cookies, which were small cakes and they weren't sweetened with sugar. They tended to be sweetened with other things that were more readily available at the time, like honey or other extracts like from plants and trees, and usually flavored with something like rose water. A tradition that carried straight on. I mean, it traveled up then, the cookie up from Persia and gathered all the spices along the spice route and made their way into Europe where they really exploded all over the place.

SM:

Yeah, we're going to talk about that later, but let's talk about Holland as well. So, when we talk about Holland coming to the US, a lot of people don't even know that. So, when they came over, you know, New Amsterdam, for example. . .

MRB:

Mm-hmm.

SM:

. . . what was the what was that little cape that they got to bring over and how was that kind of functional in America?

MRB:

The little cake was a very, was traditionally a sweet buttery cake. Often flavored, the common flavorings at the time were mace, which is the thing that you find on the outside of the nutmeg, lemon. There was a lot of lemon going on considering that we're not a tropical area. We were bringing it in from other places. And also lemons could be grown eventually in like your own greenhouse so people could have lemons. Ginger, was a huge spice. And then we also had the Sneed cookies, which they brought over with them. They weren't as easy to grow here, caraway seeds or crushed coriander. And that was what flavors the first cookie that first appears in a recipe book here.

SM:

Wow. So, let's think about this. Now I heard somewhere that it was test cake. So, they used to put like a mix of ingredients into the oven to check that it was at temperature.

MRB:

Mm-hmm.

SM:

And I've just heard that but I don't know if it's true or not. I think that's a great idea though.

MRB:

I, that's where I land on it. Having not actually been there, you know, I land on the fact that people needed to test the temperature of their ovens. And if you, and a cookie is a, you see how quickly it bakes, you see how hot the oven is. I would be worried though, that it would burn very easily in certain hot ovens that you were trying out. So, and cookies did tend to be cooked after the other things. So, when people started cooking cookies for cookie's sake, which you have to admit, once you start eating these little cakes that you've been testing in the oven, you think, why aren't I focusing on them, right? Instead of these big cakes. You needed a cool oven. I'm sorry, go on.

SM:

So, I have to... So, you start.

MRB:

I was saying you need a cooler oven, not the one you bake bread in to bake a cookie in one of the old timey ovens that you had. So.

SM:

Old timey ovens. Sounds like a great name for a band.

MRB:

Yeah.

SM:

No, but what was interesting is I know in India, for example, when we did the Tandoor, they would put after the Tandoor, which was super high heat, they would put things into the oven, which they would cook overnight like makhani dal.

MRB:

Mm.

SM:

And I wonder whether they put these cookies in to just see how the oven is going down in temperature.

MRB:

Mm-hmm.

SM:

And so, by putting them in anyway I think that's I really think and I want to believe that this is what they wanted to do with it. But tell me what, what I wanted to say as well is cookie for cookies sake that's got to be your next book hasn't it? I think that is a great name so I'm giving you that for free.

MRB:

Mm-hmm. Okay. Thank you very much.

SM:

But tell me about when they first came to America. Is that something that they went all around? Well, the East Coast of America straight away? Was it just stuck in New York where they had the Dutch and New Amsterdam, as I mentioned? Did they go across everywhere?

MRB:

They started in New York and also up in Boston. I will give some credit to the British who came. . .

SM:

Hurrah. Hurrah.

MRB:

. . . and brought their biscuits with them. It was jolly lovely, I say. But those tended to be a harder cookie, as it were. And eventually I think the two sort of melded. The earliest cookies that we have, these small cakes, really tended to be on the softer side of things, as we know, start with, and also many of them have very silly names. You know, like we're the land of, and I have an entire list of them, but we all know snickerdoodles, right?

SM:

But was that one that they invented? Tell me about these names then. I've never heard of these odd names, so that's going to be really interesting for me.

MRB:

Nobody really can pinpoint where the word snickerdoodle comes from, but people are like, well, maybe it's from a sort of German or Dutch bastardization of some other word like Schnecken or snail or something. Nobody really knows. But don't you want to eat a snickerdoodle?

SM:

Well, I thought it was much more modern. I thought it was something they came up in the 60s or 70s with.

MRB:

Snickerdoodles, I mean, they did in that everybody who went to a home economics class learned to bake a snickerdoodle.

SM:

[Laughter]

MRB:

But in the 18th and 19th century, it was a basic cookie that became popular in the Northeast. I have to say, as a person who has spent a lot of time with chocolate chip cookies, the Northeast has contributed enormously, maybe even as someone from the Northeast, I'll be a big pig headed and say, maybe the most to cookie-dom in the United States.

SM:

So, what was it that got them into the cookie-dom, as you say?

MRB:

Well, I think it has to do with sugar.

SM:

Well, that's a really interesting point because I was going to talk about sugar now because before, you know, there wasn't much sugar going around and it was something that nobles ate in England and all of that. It was very hard to get, but then it became suddenly very available. And I'm sure that must have something to do with cookies being popular as well. Would you tell us about that? I mean, how sugar... I mean, there's so much. I did a whole thing about sugar on this podcast, but a little bit about how sugar came to the United States and where it went everywhere.

MRB:

I would ask people to really listen to your podcast because it's true. This history of sugar is also a very dark history because it has so much to do with the slave trade. . .

SM:

Of course.

MRB:

. . . and enslaved peoples who, you know, died to create sugar for all of us. Right.

SM:

Yeah.

MRB:

And, and people became very, very wealthy for it, but being in these coastal towns like Boston, New York, Philadelphia. This is where people were centered, where the first cookbooks were being written and where you had access to sugar, both brown sugar and white sugar. And so, people started making cookies and doing whatever they could with it. Because you know, like once you start eating sugar, it's very hard to stop.

SM:

Yes, I have to say that. When we talk about brown sugar and white sugar, just to explain to people what's the difference between them?

MRB:

Brown sugar is moister, has molasses in it. Traditionally. There are people out there who will make their own white, brown sugar from granulated sugar.

SM:

Oh wow.

MRB:

There's a woman somewhere on the internet, very, I think she's very nice frugal housewife in Britain who is like, I'll show you how to make your brown sugar. And she does.

SM:

[Laughter]

MRB:

But mostly it's made by adding molasses, which is part of the refining process back to the refined white sugar. And it is, that's how you can make it now. And it adds a wonderful moistness to cookies. It adds a wonderful deep caramel flavor to cookies and keeps a cookie chewy. In fact, you know, we'll probably talk about this a little later, but when you're looking at creating a chocolate chip cookie, what you look at is varying the ratio of brown sugar to white sugar to vary your text, your textural outcome as we, I just made that up, but it sounds fancy.

SM:

[Laughter]

I'm going to let you get away with this British accent because you're married to a British guy, aren't you? So, I'm, you know, I'll let you get away with it. But I noticed that in most countries, you know, sugar is lower than in America. And in America, in the cookies, I read that it's twice as much or even three times as much sugar. And in the biscuits, it's which are obviously based on the ships biscuits and things like that. I noticed that they have a lot, lot, lot less sugar. I understand, I mean, I love cookies, but I can't eat them all the time.

MRB:

Mm-hmm.

SM:

So why, where does that sugary kind of love come from?

MRB:

It's, I mean, I would personally date all of this back to the industrial revolution. My favorite subject, the industrial revolution because of everything it did. And at the time in the early parts of the industrial revolution, they figured out how to refine sugar. And they also figured out how to more easily refine sugar beets, which were things that you could not just, you could grow a lot. You grew it in Hawaii and other places, but you could also grow it in the United States. In fact. . .

SM:

Yeah.

MRB:

. . . we still grow a lot of it here. But that meant that it was more readily available. But the other thing that was going on, like I said, industry busting out all over people moving from farms where they typically fed themselves to moving to cities so they could work in factories. And factories had very specific hours and I want you to work this hours and you're going to keep going. And so, what did they suggest that people eat to keep themselves ready to go and keep the mills milling and the looms looming? Sugar. It was, and so it became cheap to buy. And you know, it's like making cigarettes cheaper people. You're like, okay, this is wonderful. And it was really pushed upon workers, like industrial workers, that they should eat sugar to keep going and to keep their energy up and to get the calories that they needed, because they probably didn't have enough money to get what women call proper calories.

SM:

Oh wow. And that's again, it sounds like sugar is just, you know, a nice thing that we put into cookies, for example, but it's got all that background to it. Before we move on, would you like to tell us the difference between beet sugar and sugar cane? And because that again is coming from very different areas.

MRB:

They come from very different areas. Sugar cane mostly comes from the tropical regions. It was originally probably came from parts of India, southern India. And sugar beets were first, I think, it was a German who figured out how to transform sugar beets into refined sugar. But the difference between them is nothing. They both produce sucrose. They both produce the same molecule.

SM:

Interesting.

MRB:

And so today you might be eating sugar beet sugar, or you might be eating sugar cane sugar.

SM:

Wow, I mean that's extraordinary because again once it beets are involved it becomes a lot easier to produce and again that means that everyone gets it very cheaply.

I wanted to ask you about this though. Someone suggested that it was Alan Davidson in fact from the Oxford Companion to Food. He was the one that said they were only the cookies were only created on New Year's Day and that's the only time they were passed out. And this is very interesting because I wanted to know what you thought of that because I thought they'd constantly be feeding people these sweet treats. But I thought that was interesting.

MRB:

I don't buy into that, to be fair, with all due respect to him and to the Oxford book of food, which I love and I hold close to my heart. However, you'll see recipes for New Year's Day cookies. There are two recipes in the first cookbook that Amelia Simmons, in the first cookbook by Amelia Simmons, 1796, there are two recipes for cookies. It's the first place we see cookie spelled like cookie, like almost like we do now.

SM:

Yeah.

MRB:

Sometimes spelled with an E-Y, but here it was I-E and there's one recipe for regular cookies and one recipe for New Year's Day cookies. And the New Year's Day cookie tradition was popularized by the Dutch, our friends, the Dutch and their cookies. And they would make them, it was a... buttery spice cookie, and they would make them to hand out at their open houses that they would have that were traditional to have on New Year's Day in New York City in the early parts, in the early times when the Dutch were hanging out in what was then New Amsterdam. So, the New Year's tradition of cookies just being, there's a special New Year's cookie, but I don't think it was the only time people, it was not the only time people ate cookies. And I think Amelia Simmons sort of proves that by having a regular cookie and a New Year's Eve cookie.

SM:

Well, that's, I love the fact that when you're talking about these, you're going the same way as the questions I've got to ask you, because I wanted to talk about Amelia Simmons. Well, before that, and before she wrote about it, I'm guessing the cookies were around, but of course, but she was the first one to write it. And I don't know if you've got any of the ingredients that she used in her cookies. Maybe you could even share what those cookies are and then we could move on to something else.

MRB:

I actually on my computer, because I'm that person, I have a screenshot of the first cookbook.

SM:

Wow.

MRB:

But I closed out my preview before I came on. But I have the recipe here, if you'd like me to read it to you.

SM:

I would love you to read it because everyone, I know that people who listen to this show, most of them will go out and go, I want to try that one because they're not just, they're like you or me. They don't just want to hear, oh that's interesting. They want to go and make them. And that's really fantastic.

MRB:

Right. This is not translated from the Amelia Simmons into the modern cooking. So, this is just pure Amelia Simmons.

SM:

Which is great.

MRB:

And it's one pound sugar boiled slowly in a half pint of water. So that's an interesting way to start off. . .

SM:

Yeah.

MRB:

. . . by basically melting your sugar. Scum well, which I think is another way of removing the scum, and cool and then add two teaspoons of pearl ash, was the precursor to baking soda or baking powder that acts as a leavener, and you dissolve it in milk, the pearl ash. Then two and a half pounds of flour, rub in four ounces of butter, two large spoons of finely powdered coriander seed, and you wet that with the above. In other words, you mix the dry and wet ingredients together, as we would say today, and then you roll them half an inch thick and cut to the shape you please, which is very thoughtful of her, and bake 15 to 20 minutes in, and I love this phrase, a slack oven.

SM:

What does a slack oven mean?

MRB:

I think it means that an oven that is not ferociously hot.

SM:

That's fantastic. And that was from what year?

MRB:

1796.

SM:

Wow and that's not dissimilar to how we cook them now. I mean. . .

MRB:

Not at all. Well, except for the boiling of the sugar. But the thing that you look at in this recipe is sugar and flour are the makeup, have the highest ratio in there. There's only four ounces of butter, four ounces of butter to two and a half pounds of flour. Normally, if you made a cookie right now, you'd make a cookie with four ounces of butter and say two and a half cups of flour, which is 240 grams.

SM:

I wonder whether that's because butter was more expensive in the...

MRB:

I think so.

SM:

Wow.

MRB:

I think it was, unless you were, you you had the cow. I'm pointing outside to my backyard, like I might have a cow there. I don't have a cow in my backyard. So, I think the sugar played a much higher function in adding moisture to that cookie itself.

SM:

Oh. This is, I love that. This is so fantastic. Thank you. Because a lot of people, again, are going to listen to this and they think, we're just talking about cookies, but it's part of the gradual realization of different foods into everything that we do. So that I think that's amazing.

Now, because you write about chocolate chip cookies, when did the chocolate chip cookie come into fashion?

Your terrific book shows just how great obviously chocolate is but when did chocolate come to America? When did all of this come and then someone put them together? As it were.

MRB:

As it were, you know this, I'm sure you've talked about it on your show. Chocolate was originally a drink, right?

SM:

Yeah.

MRB:

And it wasn't until the like 1870 or so that a nice Englishman named Mr. Fry decided he figured out how to turn chocolate into a chocolate bar. The Swiss were also off doing it somewhere, but my allegiance is really with them.

SM:

[Laughter]

MRB:

But they were figuring out their own things to do with chocolate in order to incorporate and make a smooth chocolate bar. I mean, so this bar that Mr. Fry was making, Fry's Chocolate, was a smoother chocolate that was nicer to eat as opposed to the rough and ready one that you might crush up to drink. And so the chocolate bar became popular. Even at the turn of the century, chocolate became much more of an amazing snacking became more popular, right?

SM:

Interesting.

MRB:

And the idea of like the five cent chocolate bar or the two cent chocolate bar because also at the turn of the century, I mean, it's all sort of happening at once. It's really why it's my favorite period of time to study. The Hershey company was creating chocolate and people were selling it not just for the true pleasure of eating chocolate, but also because it was full of calories and everyone tried to pawn it off as something good for you too. But we, I wanted to...

SM:

Well it is, isn't it?

MRB:

Yeah, I mean...

SM:

Because I mean, I always eat chocolate and I understand that it brings me lots of energy and anyway.

MRB:

And pleasure. It brings your pleasure, right?

SM:

And a lot of pleasure, a lot of pleasure. But that's interesting because you talk about snacking, you talk about pleasure, you talk about, and before that, there wasn't much in the terms of snacking. So, I'd love to, if you know more about that, I hadn't really thought about that area of it. So, if you know anything about that, I'd love to hear it.

MRB:

I know a little bit, which is, mean, I cause it just gets into all these different parts of history. I'm like, I have to tell you about the Nabisco company. I have to tell you about Hershey's. I have to tell you about, because. . .

SM:

Cadbury's.

MRB:

Cadbury’s. I have to talk about because of our friend industrialization, it meant that processed foods soon became much more popular. Processed foods also incorporated things like sugar in them to make them have a longer shelf life. And this wasn't just a 1950s post-World War sort of thing. This was the 1870s, the 1880s. Some of our most popular foods come from that, like Philadelphia cream cheese and other things all come from around that time. And even Nabisco, I was reading about the history of Nabisco, which as we were talking about, comes from the Chelsea market. That's where, theirs is a very long story. A story of their own sort of robber baron, which I can go into at length if you want me to. But one of the things that they created at the turn of the century, their first cookie was something called the UNEEDA biscuit spelled U N E E D A. And they did sue the person who said, who wanted to create the you want a biscuit because. . .

SM:

Wow.

MRB:

. . . you know, there's always going to be someone like that. They start creating the Fig Newton.

SM:

Okay.

MRB:

They start creating animal crackers.

SM:

Wow.

MRB:

Now, when I say they start creating, I don't want people out there who know the real history to go, but there were animal crackers before that and there were fig newtons before that. They were, but Nabisco takes its big arms and wraps all of those bakeries under its own. But then I read that sometime in the 1910s, they come up with, I think that I still called nabs, those little... cheddar cheese crackers that are filled with peanut butter that you can buy at the grocery store?

SM:

I've never. . . never I've never had one of those so I don't know too much about them.

MRB:

Okay, well, I need you to go out and try them.

SM:

Okay.

MRB:

And everyone who out there in podcast land who's had them is going, mm-hmm. There are these little like square cheese crackers, like bright orange cheese crackers filled with a peanut buttery paste.

SM:

That sounds nice actually.

MRB:

And they were all really good. They're really junky and they're really good, but they were a snacking food.

SM:

Okay.

MRB:

And so this was early on in the 1900s. And that's how we started eating more and more snacks. I have drifted away though from my favorite person, which is Ruth Wakefield.

SM:

Okay, so tell us about Ruth.

MRB:

Well, Ruth is the creator, we claim today as the creator of the chocolate chip cookie.

SM:

Oh okay.

MRB:

And she, and talk about myth and I really wanted to title my, the chapter about the history of it as myth and myth understanding.

SM:

[Laughter]

MRB:

But I don't know if they let me do it. They didn't. Anyway, Mrs. Wakefield owned an inn that may not surprise you of its name. It was the Toll House Inn, which is why we eat Toll House cookies today.

SM:

Oh.

MRB:

Her inn was wildly popular with people and it was famous for its boiled New England dinners, like lobsters. She was a well-known cook. She was a former home economist and had opened this inn with her husband. And as the story goes, and there are many stories, sorry.

SM:

Where was this? Sorry. No, no, I was going to say, where is this inn?

MRB:

This inn is, well, this had burned down in the 1980s, I think.

SM:

Okay.

MRB:

And it's now like a Wendy's and a Walgreens parking lot.

SM:

[Laughter]

MRB:

But it is in Eastern Massachusetts.

SM:

Okay.

MRB:

But it was a very popular inn, and like all the famous people would, on their way out to like Cape Cod or to Nantucket, would stop there and have a fabulous dinner, like Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, they all went there. And she was looking, apparently, for, a cookie, something new to go alongside a dish of ice cream that she was serving.

SM:

Wow.

MRB:

And she decided she and she had a woman who worked with her as well, who is her sous chef there. So, I think she also I think her name was actually Sue, as it was, helped her to conjure up this cookie. There are so many myths out there. People like I heard that, you know, she didn't she'd run out of cocoa, so she put chocolate in the cookie thinking it would melt and it didn't and ta-da or that's just one of the many myths.

SM:

I'm sure there's myths about everything that we have in food right now, but it's I love those myths. . .

MRB:

Me too.

SM:

. . . that despite the fact none of them have any thing in truth, but they're really fun.

MRB:

They are. I think, and everybody has their own idea about how it started. The thing about Ruth that people don't realize is Ruth was a home economist, which was the job for ladies who liked science at the time, you know?

SM:

Yeah.

MRB:

And she would not have wasted a penny to make something that she didn't know how it was going to come out. You know what I mean? I think she was very frugal and very mindful of how a recipe worked. Nestle's sold chocolate, chocolate bars, and they had different, they were marked and they came with like its own little chisel.

SM:

Wow.

MRB:

And so you would chisel apart the bars to make the chocolate chips. Mrs. Wakefield goes on the Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air. Isn't that beautiful sounding?

SM:

It is.

MRB:

The Cooking School of the Air in Boston to go on and talk about this new popular cookie that has gained a little popularity at her inn. And that recipe then spreads to the Boston Globe picks it up. And from there, the idea for this cookie kind of spreads all over New England. Nestle sees a spike in chocolate sales and says. . .

SM:

Oh, okay.

MRB:

. . . ooh, let's see what's going on here. Why ever is this happening? And they go and see Mrs. Wakefield and they're like, hey, we'd love to put that recipe on the back of all our chocolate packages, the bars. And she's like, that's great, but what about if you made the actual chips for people? This part is all sort of. . .

SM:

Yeah, yeah.

MRB:

. . . myth, right? The myth also goes that she was paid $1 for the recipe. I know.

SM:

Wow.

MRB:

Paid $1 for the recipe and then, was given a lifetime supply of chocolate chips as a result.

SM:

That's really...

MRB:

So maybe it was a better deal. I think for Mrs. Wakefield, her first love was her inn. So maybe paying a dollar for a recipe didn't mean much to her, but the publicity that it brought the Toll House Inn, was worth it.

SM:

Wow, that's a great story. Oh. And I wanted to talk about that because right now, I still think America is the home of the cookie. That's where everyone thinks it comes from and probably it does now. So, do you think that's because, you know, affordable during, you know, affordable during the Depression or the role of supermarkets, which began to have, and that was an American thing as well. So, they began to get, you know, things to fill the shelves in the supermarket, decent things to fill the shelves. And they became many, many, many, just like there are biscuits, many, many, many types. I mean, I go into the local supermarket here and it's a whole aisle of biscuits so, or not biscuits sorry, cookies.

MRB:

Mm-hmm.

SM:

So, I really, how did that happen?

MRB:

I think Mr. Nabisco, that was not his name, the Nabisco conglomeration had a lot to do with it. And it's worth noting Mr. Cookie here that you, as the fan of the biscuit, Nabisco stands for National Biscuit Company, which is sort of funny when you think about it all being about cookies. So. But he's, you know, Mr. Nabisco is the guy named Adolphus Green, who's running the company at the beginning of the century. And he's like, okay, we gotta make sure that we sell this sanitary product. Sanitation was a big deal then. . .

SM:

Yeah, of course.

MRB:

. . . because everything was being, had been adulterated at the end of the 1800s. And they're like, we are gonna create cookies that have a better shelf life too. And they're gonna have self-sealing packages, the In-er seal, which we still have today. And he sent people out, they were called the UNEEDA Cadets. And he would send them out to clear the shelves off of stale biscuits so that whenever you met up with a Nabisco product, you were assured a sanitary, it's sanitary and delicious, do not go together.

SM:

[Laughter]

MRB:

But let's say it's 1901 and you're really hot for those two words together, sanitary and delicious experience. And it was readily available on your grocer's shelf. Why wouldn't you eat them? You didn't have to bother baking. More of us were living in cities, right?

SM:

I mean, again, this is all falling into the history side of things and people are now going, oh, but we've always had an aisle full of junk, but they don't understand how supermarkets got there, how all the things were filled with whatever they're going to be. And that's for me is so interesting.

Okay, let's just share some of the other cookies that you love, like oatmeal or well, I don't know that you love them, but you know what I'm saying.

MRB:

[Laughter]

Yeah.

SM:

You know, peanut butter, things that I love, peanut butter cookies are like my standard because I absolutely love those. Girl Scout cookies, which I've got at the moment. I've got one at the moment, which is, I can't remember what it's called now, but it's a toffee-tastic biscuit.

MRB:

Mm-hmm.

SM:

And, you know, my wife has thin mints in the freezer right now.

MRB:

In the freezer.

SM:

Of course. Yeah, of course. So, I mean, I'd love...

MRB:

I'm actually looking at a package. I'm looking at a package of peanut butter cookies, peanut butter sandwich cookies across from me right now.

SM:

And so just a few of those. I mean, how did the Girl Scout cookies start arriving?

MRB:

I don't actually know the history of the Girl Scout cookie. I just know that nowadays there's a little bit of a discrepancy between which bakery baked your Girl Scout cookies because people say flavors vary.

SM:

Oh.

MRB:

So that's something for our Instagram influencers to get on top of and like do side-by-side taste tests.

SM:

Ooh. I'll have to, yeah, I'll have to go and maybe do some testing myself.

MRB:

That was actually, I was supposed to be doing a podcast on Saturday morning and my guest was going to be late. And the reason I have chocolate, those cookies out all over there is one, I have a Girl Scout who lives next door and she's a good salesperson. And the other thing was I was like, okay, well, if he's not here on time, I'm going to start eating and tasting cookies live on my podcast to tell people how they're tasting. You know, I mean. . . .

SM:

Maybe that's because I've never tasted your cookies and I've never tasted. . . . I know because you will you're in New York and I'm in LA and they're not, you know, they're fresh. But we'll, we'll, maybe we'll have to organize that before the end. So.

MRB:

So, I was going to tell you about other kinds of cookies.

SM:

Yeah. Yeah.

MRB:

Like this snickerdoodle, which we know is this classic. I did a sort of stunt piece for Food52 at one point where I tested 12 different snickerdoodle recipes to come and to be able to figure out the best snickerdoodle recipe from all of this tasting, rather like Ella Quintner does with her books now.

SM:

Is that because you wanted to taste snickerdoodles or because you had to taste? People can't see this, but I'm doing finger quotes because yeah, I'm sure I'm sure you just had to, didn't you? You just had to.

MRB:

I'm saying, you know, Simon, my father was a scientist and I grew up in the learning about the scientific methods. So of course, I felt the need to try all of them before arriving at the perfect one.

SM:

Of course, of course.

MRB:

I would it be, I mean, I have to have some sort of, you know, this is how I get my street cred as far as cookies are concerned.

SM:

So, what other types of cookies have you been trying? The different types of what and what names they have to them.

MRB:

Well, the oatmeal cookie is also, I think, considered, even though the oatmeal style cookie came to us from our Scottish and English forebears who came over here, we really transformed it from being a very sort of dry digestive, with no disrespect to the digestive, we can talk about them later. I will.

SM:

No arguments about the digestive. I love the digestive. Love the digestive.

MRB:

Ever. I was gonna admit this maybe at the end, Simon, but I would actually say the dark chocolate covered digestive may be in my top three cookies.

SM:

Well, mine is the hobnob covered in chocolate, but we'll talk about that later on then.

MRB:

Anyway, we'll talk about that later. So, the oatmeal cookie came about in the 1900s. First, there are some recipes that appear before Fannie Farmer, the famed head of the Boston Cooking School, who publishes her seminal cookbook around that time. And that really spread cookies all over the United States because it was such a popular cookbook. And she had recipes for an oatmeal cookie, much like the one we would see today. And also raisins, like a lot of these recipes come out of like promotional pamphlets from the California raisin board. And they had a recipe in like 1910 for oatmeal cookies stuffed with raisins. And we will go from there. There are people out there who don't like oatmeal cookies because of the raisins.

SM:

[Laughter]

MRB:

I say to you, leave the raisins, put chocolate chips in it.

SM:

Oh. That's really interesting. But that's what I was going to ask you is, from northeast of England, from northeast of America, how did it go? You know, I mentioned right now that I've got a cookie store in our gas station and it's at the back and it's beautiful. And that's because the wife has married the owner of the gas station and the gas, and she's put up this cookie store and it's wonderful. And so how did it go all the way across the US? Was that because the rail travel and they served it on the trains as well? How did that happen? Because now there's not a city, there's not a town, there's not a little village that doesn't have a cookie operation of some sort.

MRB:

Well, I think that the German bakers that moved to this country and started spreading the joy of cookies, because cookies are very important part of like German baking culture. And so, the buttery cookies that we come to know and love around Christmas time, spread through, I mean, think about Chicago as being a center for these sort of baked goods, and they spread out into the Midwest. The Southern. . . . The South has its own tradition, heavily influenced by the African-American cooks who had to cook for people. And it's there where we get peanut butter, not the peanut butter cookie, but we get of course, Booker T. Washington trying to find a nutritious food for people. And of course, being American, then we're like, woohoo, let's turn it into a cookie. . .

SM:

[Laughter]

MRB:

. . . because right, let's add some sugar, more sugar to it. And the peanut butter cookie first makes its appearance, supposedly. This is what my research shows me. Around the 1930s, we start getting a peanut butter cookie.

SM:

Wow. Let's move on from there because we could stay talking about that forever. Have you ever thought about opening a shop? Then I might be able to buy cookies.

MRB:

I'm more than happy to give you cookies.

SM:

Okay.

MRB:

I never wanted to, I've always, I dream about opening a shop, but I just, I don't have the work ethic to get up at three o'clock in the morning.

SM:

It's like me. I'm like people going have you ever opened a restaurant and I go no.

MRB:

Do you know how hard that is?

SM:

But where does your obsession with cookies come from then because you are obsessed with it I know that from following you and speaking to you and. . . . Everything is about you know, they're not about but is you know has got cookies involved in it, I think. I even your even your politics has cookies involved with it.

MRB:

It's really true because it's a nice balance. You know what I mean? I think if I really, you know, if this is my hourly session and you're my therapist, doctor, I would probably say. . .

SM:

[Laughter]

MRB:

. . . the story I was told was that I was a wee baby in my mother's arms, right? New baby, cried a lot in the middle of the night, but my mother wanted to keep my brothers quiet. Let my brothers who are much older than I am sleep through the night and didn't want the baby's cries.

SM:

[Laughter]

MRB:

So we would go down to the kitchen and she would feed me, you know, what it probably formula and she would feed me formula and she would eat these cookies from New York City that her mother would send out to her from the best bakery called Ellen's, which no longer exists, but it was a German bakery that made beautiful butter cookies, the kind that are dipped in chocolate.

SM:

Ooh.

MRB:

And so, I was taking in cookie smell and seeing my happy mother and being happy drinking.

SM:

[Laughter]

MRB:

I mean, come on, let's, we don't need to true therapists do this. Cookies have featured heavily all my life. Also, why not? They make you happy. You know?

SM:

Yeah, well, why not? There you go. That's the perfect answer. Why not?

I've had the best time talking about this and I know you're a great person. I love but I wanted to say so we've got the cookbook here, which is fantastic.

So you've got The Secret Life of Chocolate Chip Cookies: Exciting New Ways to Enjoy Everyone's Favorite Dessert. But first of all are there any cookies that you hate? Oooh.

MRB:

I mean, hate is a strong word. mean, do you want to really like, it's like hating a nice person. You know what I mean? It's a cookie.

SM:

No, no, because there must be things that you just go, hmm, this has got, I'm not saying it's got celery in it, but it's got, you know, it's got, it's got something in it that you just go.

MRB:

I will, I'm gonna upset people with what I say.

SM:

Okay.

MRB:

I really dislike a very popular American cookie that's often found at the top of everybody's like Christmas tin that they give you called chocolate crinkles.

SM:

Ooh. I don't think I've even heard of those.

MRB:

It's a chocolate cookie, it's a chocolate cookie that they roll in powdered sugar and when it bakes, gets all crackly looking. It's adorable, but it's never chocolatey enough.

SM:

Oh.

MRB:

It's just sort of sweet and vaguely cocoa-y, and I've never found one that satisfies.

SM:

Oh and finally if we. . . you've written this book about the chocolate chip cookies what are you going to write next?

MRB:

Well, I think, what did we say? Cookies for cookie's sake. I have so many cookie recipes that I think maybe a cookie book is next.

SM:

Yeah, like what would you call it? Cookies for. . .

MRB:

Cookies for cookie's sake.

SM:

. . . cookies for cooking sake. I think that's a great one. And like I said, you can have that from me.

MRB:

For free or is there a charge?

SM:

No charge. Just send me some cookies.

MRB:

The other book I'm really pondering is another one that brings warmth to my being, which is the idea of the Sunday lunch.

SM:

Oh. Well, the Sunday lunch is something that I just love doing when I was when I'm in England, I love doing the Yorkie puddings and all of that. I'm from Yorkshire. When we were on this show, we talk about anything. You know, people can come on and talk about what they know. But if they love something else, we'll always talk about that. And originally the Yorkshire pudding was flat and it was just beneath the roast beef and the beef juices fell on this and it was in a big tray and that was how the Yorkshire pudding. So you ate the Yorkshire pudding first as your kind of starter. You didn't have it with your main dish and then you had it separately for dessert with cream or ice cream or something like that. So, in Yorkshire, that's how they did it. It was it was really terrific. I remember and we. . . . It's really. .  . .

MRB:

That is unbelievable.

SM:

Yeah, so it was really interesting that they didn't have it with their main course. They had it for appetizer or whatever they call it at beginning and for the dessert. So that's

MRB:

Have you ever eaten it with the cream and the sugar or whatever?

SM:

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

MRB:

Oh wow.

SM:

All the time. And it was really delicious at both times, but you never had it in the middle. Obviously now it's moved to this, it looks like a popover and it's very nice and very, very tasty. But originally it was a very flat, like little pancake-y thing. They're a bit higher than that, but it was really good. Okay, now.

Now we're going to ask, I hope these are all fun, we're to, I hope so anyway, otherwise we'll have no one listening to this. But these are some fun questions that I always ask.

So, if Marissa was a meal anywhere in time anywhere in history what would it be?

MRB:

I think I would be, you know, I would be, one of my brothers said to me once wisely, if they're not all that many pleasures being an adult.

SM:

[Laughter]

MRB:

One of the things you can control is that if you wanted to, you could have cookies for an appetizer and you could have cookies for dinner and you could have cookies for dessert. So that's my meal. Would you go and have the cookies that maybe Ruth will cook for you?

That if I could go back in time and see something, I would want to be there as she invented the chocolate chip cookie, because there's, like I said, there's so much myth around it. I want the real story.

SM:

That's fantastic. I love that.

If Marissa had to go back in time to any meal, what would that be?

MRB:

As a historian, I find that a little bit challenging.

SM:

That's why it's there.

MRB:

Because I, I, I studied, um, like I said, the early 1900s, big deal for me. I studied King Edward the seventh and his eating habits for a long while.

SM:

I love that. I was thinking that yesterday about going back to his time. I was thinking that myself, which is really...

MRB:

That's so funny. Do know what his nickname was?

SM:

No, what was his nickname?

MRB:

King Tum Tum.

SM:

Fantastic. I went to the place in London where he used to go and have his affairs, it's above Rules.

MRB:

Mm-hmm.

SM:

And I went and it was a bar, it had been turned into the most, well it still has, the most glorious bar, but that's where he used to take his lady friends up to that and that was, he was a, he was a, what was the word, he was a. . .

MRB:

Hedonist.

SM:

No, he was something else. Raconteur and everything that he don't... Anyway. But anyway.

MRB:

He did, he lived for pleasure. And if you went, he came to your country estate, you know, they would pour out like a 16-course meal for him. But I can't stand the idea of eating that, wearing a corset. And I probably don't want to eat like tarmogen or whatever bird it was they were throwing at him. And I thought like maybe the Algonquin round table, like just a simple, you know, loads of martinis, which isn't food, I grant you, but that's, I would want to fit in. I'd want to fit in.

SM:

It is. It is food. So, tell people about who the Algonquin people are because they're from the Algonquin Hotel in New York. But tell them about all the people, Harpo Marx, all these people.

MRB:

Me, I would want to sit across from Dorothy Parker and hope that she wouldn't like, you know, send her barbs my way, but it's what came with it, right? It was all the great literati of the time, literati, what a word, but you know, Robert Benchley, Edmund Wilson, Dorothy Parker, and others who would be there, and I'm forgetting lots of them, and. . . .

SM:

It’s only a short group. I remember them playing croquet on the top of the Algonquin Hotel. They went up there. I mean they had a great story and if they had the dinners that would be great. That's a fantastic.

MRB:

Yeah. And so that dinner and they would eat very plain food. So, I'd be eating like a delicious, I mean, what's wrong with a club sandwich? Nothing.

SM:

Nothing wrong with a club sandwich. Nothing wrong. Which I believe means chicken underlaid lettuce and bacon. That's what it means.

MRB:

Not just that I was eating it at my fancy club, it means chicken.

SM:

No, it's chicken under lettuce and bacon. So, there you go. I see again, this is where I love where this all comes from. And that comes from a hotel. I can't remember where it was in New York, I believe. But anyway, OK. And last question of this.

If Marissa had to go back in time to see the invention of everything, but what would it be?

MRB:

I think I mentioned this before, but I want to be there as Ruth Wakefield pulls those first Toll House cookies out of the oven, turns to me and says, would you like one? And I can taste the first chocolate chip cookies coming out of the oven at the Toll House Inn.

SM:

That would be fantastic.

Now finally, just for this, what are your social media sites? I know Substack, but tell us about all of them because they're, you know, and whatever you've got show, tell us.

MRB:

Okay, everybody sit down, quietly. got them all. No, usually if you're looking for me, you can find me at Marissa Rothkopf Eats on Instagram, Marissa Rothkopf on Bluesky. I'm on Threads with a similar name like Marissa Rothkopf. And of course, the place where I spend most of my time now is Substack. It's Marissa Rothkopf dot substack dot com.

SM:

Fantastic and I know that I'm beginning to write on Substack the last three months and I'm getting lots of followers and I think you begin to write a lot of things that are weightier than you ever wrote on other things so that's great as well.

I loved having you on on this I think that was absolutely just amazing you've been great so I just want to say. . .

MRB:

Thank you.

SM:

I just want say a huge thank you to you for coming on and doing this. And it's been so much fun.

OUTRO MUSIC

SM:

Make sure to check out the website associated with this podcast at www.EatMyGlobe.com where we will be posting the transcripts from each episode, along with all the references and resources we used putting the episodes together, in case you want to delve deeper into each subject. There is also a contact button, so please do let us know if there are any subjects that you would like us to cover.

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Thank you and goodbye from me, Simon Majumdar, and we’ll speak to you soon on the next episode of EAT MY GLOBE: Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know About Food.

CREDITS

The EAT MY GLOBE Podcast is a production of “It’s Not Much But It’s Ours” and “Producer Girl Productions.”

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We would also like to thank Sybil Villanueva for all of her help both with the editing of the transcripts and essential help with the research.