Have you ever felt sorry for a person because they weren’t aware of the existence of a wonderful thing until you told them about it, even though you have been enjoying this wonderful thing for years and years and had assumed everybody else had also been enjoying this wonderful thing for as long as you have? I felt this way earlier in the week when a co-worker said to me, “What’s a snickerdoodle?”
What is a snickerdoodle? What kind of sad life has this person led until now that did not include the word snickerdoodle, let alone the delicious cookie that bears that name? Actually, it seems that people born before the 20th century were snickerdoodle-free as well, as there were plenty of little cakes with sugar and cinnamon and cream of tartar being made, but they weren’t called snickerdoodles. Food historians believe the name is most likely the product of good old Yankee ingenuity.
Before television and the internet and anti-gravity boots, people had to work a little harder to amuse themselves. The way that people in New England amused themselves was by giving strange names to food items, as evidenced by other cookie names from the region such as jolly boys, plunkets, tangle breeches, and kinkawoodles. And let’s not forget crybabies. Never forget the crybabies. The modern world, for all its troubles, is truly a good place if we can enjoy both the internet and snickerdoodles at the same time. I hope my co-worker knows about the internet.
