Monkey bread, mud pie, ladyfingers, shoofly pie — desserts sure do have some curious names, many with no relation to their true ingredients.
Add “snickerdoodle” to the list.
This classic brown sugar and cinnamon cookie has nothing to do with absent-minded drawings, muffled laughter, or the famous candy bar. So, where did it get its peculiar title? No one can say for sure, though several plausible word-on-the-street tales involve European linguistic quirks.
The German word schneckennudeln (translation: "snail noodles") began as the name of a ham and cheese pasta dish, before being borrowed to title a German cinnamon roll with a shape that curls like a snail’s shell (though the relation to the mollusk stops there). When the latter recipe morphed into a cinnamon-centric cookie and crossed the Atlantic in the early 1900s, the original term, legend has it, was anglicized into “snickerdoodle.”
READ MORE: The 50 Most Popular Types of Cookies
Food historians propose the name is born of the Dutch term snekrad, meaning "crinkle" or "wrinkle,” applied in reference to the characteristic cracked surface of the cookie that forms as it bakes. An equally feasible concept involves an evolution of the "snipdoodle" coffee cake, a cinnamon- and sugar-topped favorite of the Pennsylvania Dutch (who actually have no relation to the aforementioned Dutch nation).
The Pennsylvania Dutch snipdoodle cake rose to prominence in the early 1800s. But by century’s end, the culture’s cookbooks were listing recipes for both a snipdoodle cake and a drop cookie (meaning dough dropped in a ball from a spoon rather than rolled flat, for baking) called a snickerdoodle. As the 1900s dawned, however, the snickerdoodle began to appear in mainstream bakeries, most with no connection to the isolated Pennsylvania Dutch people whatsoever.
Lastly, some historians say snickerdoodle is simply a nonsense term spawned by American bakers to draw attention toward a rather basic cookie, and that the zany sound of children chanting “snickerdoodle” in bakeries may have been enough to make it stick.
Whatever the case, by the 1920s, the snickerdoodle had become a mainstay in conventional American cookbooks, and 100 years later, its name is firmly preserved in baking lore.
Whichever yarn you want to believe, just know that Cheryl’s follows the hallowed tradition of making snickerdoodle cookies precisely, using real butter, brown sugar, fresh eggs, wheat flour, and cinnamon, and baking them to a light, golden crust, encasing a soft, chewy inside.
AUTHOR
A former arts and culture writer for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania's Pulitzer Prize-winning Patriot News, Jonathan Rowe is a New York-based feature writer for SPIN, Men's Fitness, and WONDERLUST travel. He has crafted original content and news for Sony Music, Live Nation, Spotify, and ESPN, and works as a songwriter in conjunction with multiple Grammy winners.
