It’s National Cookie Day! Yay!

You can’t talk about cookies without the Dutch and New Netherlands and you can’t talk about New Netherlands without talking about Albany.

By now you all know that the word cookie comes from the Dutch “koekje” (little cakes). As the Dutch adopted English customs, recipes of some Albany women refers to “cakes” and “wafers”, the English terms for cookie-like things, but you also see use of the words koeks (cakes) and koejkes sometimes interchangeably. A famous example is the “dood koeks”.. dead cakes, which were actually cookies served at New Netherlands Dutch funerals.

In some Albany Dutch family recipe collections (Maria Schuyler Van Rensselaer- sister of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton) by the late 1700s koekjes becomes “coekjes”. The first time the word “cookie” appears in publication is in Amelia Simmons “American Cookery” (the definitive second edition was published in Albany in 1796) as cookies and cookery. But the term cookie doesn’t seem to catch on right away.. (I know.. so not possible.. but true). In the “Frugal Housewife” in 1829 (Lydia Maria Child) perhaps the most well-known of the early 19th century cookbooks, there is nary a cookie to be found. But there are little cakes and jumbles, and we know by the recipes that these are actually what we think of as cookies.

And then we have a cookie explosion after the Civil War.(I’m thinking those New York boys spread the word about the glory of the cookie all across the North and South.) By 1880, there is not a single cookbook that doesn’t include cookie recipes.

So to celebrate the fact that today is Cookie Day (which really SHOULD be an Albany holiday) we’ve included a collection of old Albany cookie recipes, with some updates by the brilliant New Netherlands food historian, Peter Rose, and some newer (100 year old ) recipes that you can make today without pounds of flour, hog lard, pearl ash and a dozen eggs.