| Country: | United States |
| Type: | Cookie |
| Main Ingredient: | Flour, butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, baking powder, or baking soda |
A sugar cookie, or sugar biscuit, is a cookie with the main ingredients being sugar, flour, butter, eggs, vanilla, and either baking powder or baking soda.[1] Sugar cookies may be formed by hand, dropped, or rolled and cut into shapes. They may be decorated with additional sugar, icing, sprinkles, or a combination of these. Decorative shapes and figures can be cut into the rolled-out dough using a cookie cutter.
In North America, sugar cookies are popular during the holidays of Children's Day, Christmas, Halloween, Easter, and Hanukkah.
The name Nazareth cookie came from the people of Nazareth, Pennsylvania who came from Germany. The cookie later took on other names in other countries. In England they were called sugar biscuits as well as jumbles.[2] Sugar cookies were also called gemmells, crybabies, gimbletts, cimbellines, jumbles, and plunketts.
Sugar cookies have a plain flavor and have been made for centuries. The popularity and availability of sugar cookies rose when sugar became widely available. The sugar cookie is believed to have originated in the mid-1700s in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. German Protestant settlers created a round, crumbly and buttery cookie that came to be known as the Nazareth cookie.
Jumbles are the earliest form of sugar cookies. These cookies were very dry and were not very enjoyable; however people used them as Christmas ornaments. People would cut out these sugar cookies into different shapes and hang them on their Christmas tree.[3]
Early Dutch settlers came to settle “New Netherland” would trade sugar biscuits (cookies) and other sweet treats to the Native Americans for fur and other resources. This later became Nazareth, Pennsylvania. When they first began making the Nazareth cookies, they made it in the shape of the state's keystone emblem.
In the early 1700’s, cookies were expensive due to their unique taste and texture compared to other desserts.
Published recipes for the sugar cookie began to appear in the 1800s. Some of these early variations included sour cream or large amounts of milk, in addition or in place of the now-standard ingredients.[4] In 1885, The Boston Globe published a recipe for sugar cookies that omitted liquid dairy ingredients, included baking powder, and had a ratio of one cup of sugar to one half cup of butter.[5]
In the late 1950s, Pillsbury began selling pre-mixed refrigerated sugar cookie dough in US grocery stores, as a type of icebox cookie.[6]
Sugar cookies take various shapes, depending on the type of sugar cookie. When a sugar cookie is dropped, they typically are in the shape of a circle. When they are rolled, cookie cutters are often used to form the cookies into different shapes, such as hearts or animals.[7]
Sugar cookies were created by the German Protestants of Nazareth, Pennsylvania. They soon became popular and began spreading all across the world for their unique taste. Other places would also use them as ornaments but after the original recipe was changed by adding more butter, removing the caraway seeds, and reducing the amount of flour, people began eating them more instead of only hanging them up for show. This change in recipe gives us our modern day sugar cookie.