A recipe for easy cookies that you can make yourself

– Shall we make cookies?

– Homemade cookies, heck, I said butter. Isn’t that just buying from a store?

We buy many things in the store out of old habit. Ice cream, shortbread and fishcakes are all examples of letting factories do the work for us.

At first we did it maybe out of sheer laziness. At the beginning of industrialization, everyone still knew how to make fish balls, fish pudding, and we don’t need a recipe to bake (the world’s best) bread.

The roots of buying ready-made products are laziness. But then we lost knowledge. Cooking is something we always get better at doing. It’s about gaining experience, experience and more experience.

And if we don’t get the experience because we suddenly buy brioche, stuffed flounder and wiener – yes, it has to go as it is. We forget to cook. And losing knowledge.

Laziness and lack of knowledge are not the most charming qualities of modern man, I argue. But that must be enough criticism of civilization.

Eating cookies can trigger the strangest train of thought (obviously). Was this why the English were so fond of tea and biscuits?

What is a biscuit?

A biscuit is a crispy little pastry that is hard and has a very long shelf life. A quick etymological background check is very enlightening. European word cookies (biscottiin Italian) consists of two words, bis which means two and coctus which means baked/boiled. So it’s something that’s been baked twice – and that’s what you need to make a biscuit. It needs to be baked twice to be so dry.

The biscuit story is funnier than you might think.

Amazing durability made the biscuit handy for anyone traveling long distances. Among sailors and soldiers it has been decisive for success. England has a biscuit to thank for its empire.

The Roman historian Pliny claimed that Parthian biscuits could last for centuries and were perfect for legionnaires. During the reign of King Louis the Fourteenth, the cookie got its name from the soldiers’ rides pain de pierre – stone bread. And the hard pieces became so strongly associated with military life that they were called “soldier biscuits” – even after the biscuit had evolved into something more like bread.

Different types of cookies

We are mostly used to eating sweet cookies. But they don’t have to be. Below you will find cheese cookies made with thyme and French herb mixture Herbes de Provence.

There’s a golden middle ground in good oat cookies – here’s a little maple syrup mixed in.

Otherwise, you can also find two sweet varieties. One is a biscuit with chocolate and cream cheese, while the other is a classic biscuit. Biscotti is a lovely biscuit shaped like a loaf of bread, fried for a while before slicing and then further frying the slices.

It is then fried twice – hi scotty – will you get caught? Italians and I like to dip them in sweet vin santo wine.

Haven’t tried it?

Then you have a lot to look forward to.

This topic was first published on 04/21/2015 and last updated on 06/26/2017