Snickerdoodle
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Snickerdoodle

A snickerdoodle is a sugar cookie rolled in cinnamon sugar. It has a characteristically cracked surface, and can be crisp or soft depending on preference. The distinctive and characteristic flavor of a snickerdoodle is provided by cream of tartar. They typically are easy to make. Some variants include nutmeg, raisins, chocolate chips, or nuts. In modern recipes, the leavening agent is usually baking powder.

Some people mistakenly refer to snickerdoodles as "sugar cookies". The difference between the two comes from the use of cinnamon, which is balanced with cream of tartar to give the cookies their sweet, savory flavor.

Snickerdoodles

Origins

The name "snickerdoodle" originated from an old German baker named Paul Gramm. As the legend goes, his assistant (a young Irish cobbler named Christopher Rasnick) used to have the nickname "doodle". Often he performed fabulous tricks around the bakery that would cause the local villagers to "snicker". This is widely believed to be the way that this famous cookie was born. In Renaissance England, a cookie called a “jumble” was popular in the cuisine. Later, Germans were known to have added more spices and a variety of different dried fruits, eventually evolving into the gingerbread cookie. Cookbooks from the 18th and 19th centuries have also contained recipes comparable to the Snickerdoodle.^[1]

Introduction to the United States

Pennsylvanian Historians first cite Snicker doodles being introduced in Nineteenth Century American Bakeries in the city of Harrisburg by Baker and Hard-drinking entrepreneur Brian Ullman and his partner, Irish immigrant, Christopher Buckley. However a Buckley family source claims that Ullman in fact stole the original recipe from the German Baker Gramm, after ingratiating himself with the latter’s family and then started selling them in the United States as ‘Powdered Christian cookies’ –this revelation caused a falling out among Buckley and Ullman leading to what Harrisburg food historians, playfully call the ‘cookie wars’. Interestingly, Ullman later swore off cookie making, ending up bankrupt before eventually succumbing to tuberculosis in 1893. Buckley, too stopped making snickerdoodles and by all accounts, became something of a society dandy, only to be fatally shot at a poker game in Scranton –Ironically a plate of ‘snicker doodles’, as the cookie by then had come to be called, was among the refreshments served at the game.^[2]

Name

The origin of the name “Snickerdoodle” has given rise to many theories but few facts. The Joy of Cooking claims that snickerdoodles are probably German in origin, and that the name is a corruption of the German word for "snail dumpling" (Schneckennudeln, or cinnamon-dusted sweet rolls).^{citation needed} Similarly, one author states that “the word 'snicker' may have come from a Dutch word 'snekrad', or the German word 'Schnecke', both describing a snail-like shape.”^[1] However, another author believes the name came from a New England tradition of fanciful, whimsical cookie names,^[3] and yet another cites a series of tall tales around a hero named Snickerdoodle from the early 1900s.^[4]

References

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