Pearson’s crackers were large, round, crisp and not exactly refined crackers which were known as “pilot” or as “ship” bread, as well as “hard tack.” These were popular with merchant marines who welcomed any type of food that would keep for a long period aboard a ship, and ordinary bread perished quickly.Īn early competitor of Pearson was Joshua Bent, who had a craker baking operation in Milton, Massachussetts in 1801.
#WORD COOKIES CRACKER#
One of the first, if not the first, cracker manufacturing businesses in the United States was the firm of Theodore Pearson in Newburyport, Massachusetts, beginning in 1792. The name of cracker lived on the in United States, however. Great demand for these crackers even occurred overseas, but the cracker designation was promptly dropped and they were absorbed into the generic “biscuit” classification. They were hard, flat, plain, unsweetened but crisps products which became very popular and in demand. On the other hand, some American bakers had begun to produce products called crackers in the later 18th century. Before this time, the word biscuit had never been applied to these products, in the states. However, the word did not really come to America, via England, until around the middle of the 19th century. When the word came into the French language it is hard to say. The word biscuit got to England via the French, who had, as mentioned above, gotten it from the Romans. The soda cracker, an American product, predates the cream cracker, and, as we shall see, the word cracker, in the United States, predates the word biscuit as well.
But this does not mean that there were not more specific names for specific products, for instance, the “cream cracker,” which contained no cream, and was an Irish invention. In England, the word was an over-riding term used to describe all such products. Thin, hard, flat, and crispy biscuits became crackers, while the more luxurious and sweetened biscuits became cookies. However, the word for the food, whether related to this or not, did not originate in America.Īmericans developed very specific classifying labels for two different sorts of biscuits.
#WORD COOKIES CRACK#
The word “crack” in Middle English referred to entertaining or fun conversation, and today we still crack jokes.
It’s also associated with “cracking the whip” and to “cracking corn.” However, the word originally came from Elizabethan England, and was used to describe a braggart or boaster. This seems confusing when people try to relate the word for say, a saltine, with the word referring to “mean white folks” usually of Scots-Irish descent, who settled on the frontiers of the Virginias, Carolinas, Maryland, and Georgia. Prior to this, cookies would have been called biscuits, just like they still are today in England.Īt some point, Americans not only were referring to sweet biscuits as cookies, but began calling unsweetened biscuits, anything hard, flat, and crisp, crackers. New York became such an important city that the word cookie, which we got from the Dutch, became the standard word for all such baked goods. People often wonder why the English called a cookie a biscuit (or a sweet biscuit) and why we, in America call the same sort of thing a cookie.
This history lesson also helps explain another mystery. Why Do the British Say Biscuit Instead of Cookie? You can read more about words related to cook here at CulinaryLore. The origin of the word cook is completely different, being of Latin origin.
So, no, the word cookie has nothing to do with the word cook. It sounds a bit like KOOOK-YES to my ear. The Duch sound for the long oo is written as oe, so the word koekje sounds pretty similar to the English word cookie. But in this instance, it came right to America rather than entering the language earlier, via Britain. Like many English words, it is of basically Germanic origin. And that is how we got our English word for “little cakes,” which is really what a cookie is. According to written evidence (we only have written mentions to surmise when a word “officially” enters a language) an early iteration in English was cockies which then led to the word cookies. It took that long for most of the Dutch people in the colony to be regularly speaking English, which led to the word koekjes to naturally evolve into a more English sounding word. Nevertheless, koekjes kept their name for a couple of decades.
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