Tonight, we’ll read the section on baking cookies from “Woman’s Institute Library of Cookery Volume 4”, written by The Woman’s Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences.

The Woman’s Institute was founded by Mary Brooks Picken in Scranton, PA. Born in Kansas in 1886, Picken wrote the first dictionary to be published by a woman in the English language, beyond the over one hundred other books she wrote.

The word "cookie" comes from the Dutch word "koekje", which was Anglicized when the Dutch brought cookies to America in the late 1620s.

The old fashioned spelling for cookies has the word ending with a “Y” instead of “ie”. The “ie” spelling became dominant in the 1950s, except where the older “y” spelling was still used in some prominent titles, such as “Betty Crocker's Cooky Book”. This was likely a result of the colonial revivalism happening at that time, with greater interest in old-fashioned recipes and colonial culture that lasted from the 1920s to the Bicentennial of the 1970s.

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