{"id":10269,"date":"2022-08-24T08:09:36","date_gmt":"2022-08-24T12:09:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theleemsmachine.com\/bean\/?p=10269"},"modified":"2022-08-17T13:27:13","modified_gmt":"2022-08-17T17:27:13","slug":"cooky-cookie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theleemsmachine.com\/bean\/blog\/2022\/08\/24\/cooky-cookie\/","title":{"rendered":"Cooky Cookie"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I know I am not the first person to ponder the frequent incidence of the word ‘cooky’ in old cooking pamphlets and recipe books, but no one has yet explored this ‘alternate spelling’ on the internets to my edification. And ‘alternate spelling’ is what is given as a reason for the existence of ‘cooky’ in dictionaries. I thought maybe cooky’s etymological history would explain it, but no. The Online Etymology Dictionary<\/a> says simply that ‘cookie’ is possibly derived from a 1730 Scottish term meaning “plain bun,” but it’s definition in 1808 as a “small, flat, sweet cake” is more similar to the Dutch koekje “little cake,” a diminutive of koek “cake.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The etymological histories didn’t even get into how British English calls the same types of confection ‘biscuits.’ Michele Debczak at Mental Floss (2012)<\/a> points out that the two ‘sweet baked goods’ actually refer to two different types of confection, but does not explore why, even if they have been categorically described as either slower cooking soft thick dough (cookie) or a thin crisp baking stiff dough (biscuit), the terms are more often used based on country and not on type of bake. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was foolishly hoping to find some online search or service that could comb through historical resources for word popularity similar to how Google Trends<\/a> combs through the internet search history, but alas. The closest I got was the Google books ngram viewer<\/a>, which can report on the frequency of words within the Google Books catalog (Wikipedia<\/a>). <\/p>\n\n\n\n