74
savor
Southern Cookie
Collective
• B Y C O L L E E N T H O M P S O N •
COOKIES are subjective, we all
have our favorite: crispy, gooey,
chewy, crunchy. Some we like to
dip in milk, others we only bake
at certain times of the year, and
some simply take us straight back
to childhood — little bites of nostalgia.
These handheld treats don’t need much
culinary mastery, and are way more forgiving
than cakes. Baking a homemade
batch of cookies is an easy way to hustle
up a retro taste of the South.
We can thank the English, Scotch and
Dutch immigrants for bringing their cookie
recipes to North Carolina’s shores. In early
cookbooks, cookies were usually listed at
the end of the cake chapters, as an after-thought.
They were called whimsical names
like jumbles, plunkets and cry babies.
Southern housewives have always taken
great pride in their cookies, calling them
tea cakes. After the Civil War, many freed
slaves took their beloved tea cake recipes
with them across the United States, firmly
entrenching and evolving them into the
fabric of American culture.
WBM april 2019