Girl Scout Cookies

Girl Scout cookies have been around almost as long as Girl Scouts. The cookie program teaches decision making, goal setting, money management, pole skills and business ethics.

Girl Scouts began selling homemade cookies in 1917, when the Mistletoe Troop in Muskogee, Oklahoma baked and sold cookies in its high school cafeteria as a service project. This was intended to give girls experience making and selling cookies, as well as to generate funds for Girl Scout activities.

Scout cooking was a hot area - the 1918 book Camp Cookery: A cookery and Equipment Handbook for Boy Scouts and Other Campers by Ava B. Milan, A. Grace Johnson, and Ruth McNary Smith contained a recipe for rolled oat cookies which were to be baked on a grill over an open fire.

By the 1920s as troops shared recipes and ideas, some local council began engaging commercial bakers to produce and package the cookies as fundraisers for their Scout troops. Soon troops were competing in cookies sales in local regions.

As the idea caught on, national headquarters sought to regulate and regularize this fundraising possibility. By 1936 the national Girl Scout organization began licensing bakers to produce cookies. The following year, many Girl Scouts Council sponsored cookie sales.

In 1951, three flavors were sold: Sandwich, Shortbread and Chocolate Mints. Concerns for the nutritional content of Girl Scouts cookies became an important issue during the 1990s. As a result, new low-fat and sugar-free cookies became available.
Girl Scout Cookies

History of Nabisco

Nabisco, once a mighty cookie and cracker company, exists today only as a brand name, part of global conglomerate Kraft Foods.

In 1889 William Moore united six eastern bakeries into the New York Biscuit Company. In 1890 Adolphus Green united forty midwestern bakeries under the name the American Biscuit & Manufacturing Company.

In 1898 Moore and Green together with John G. Zeller of Richmond Steam Bakery formed the National Biscuit Company.

This merger ended the cutthroat competition among the companies. The new entity dominated the cracker and cookie industry.

By the early 1940s, the company had 59 manufacturing facilities across the country producing some 200 products.

In 1971 the National Biscuit Company changed its name to Nabisco, Inc.  In 1981 Ross Johnson of Standard Brands instrumental the merging of Nabisco with Standard Brands Incorporated to become Nabisco Brands, Inc.

In 1985 RJ Reynolds Industries, Inc., in an attempt to reduce its reliance on tobacco, acquired Nabisco brands, Inc. The acquisition created the largest consumer goods company in the United States.

A year later, in 1986, RJ Reynolds Industries Inc. changed its name to RJR Nabisco, Inc. and RJR’s Del Monte and Nabisco Brands operations were combined to form Nabisco Brands, Inc.

Philip Morris Companies, Inc. acquired Nabisco in December 2000 for $18.9 billion and merged it with Kraft Foods.

Eventually Kraft Foods was spun off into a separate company where Nabisco lives on as a brand name.

In 2010 Kraft Foods announced that it was making its Nabisco line of crackers healthier by adding more whole wheat.
History of Nabisco 

Oat Cuisine

Oat Cuisine
When an innovative and enterprising immigrant Ohio miller named Ferdinand Schumacher began promoting his new steel-cut as a nutritious cereal in the 1860s, editorial writers and cartoonists of the day scoffed, insinuating that oats-eaters robbed horses and would develop the whinnies.

The Scots, whose taste for oats was already known, were dismissed as being too cheap or too poor to consume anything else.

Nevertheless, Schumacher’s steel-cut oats, his even more convenient rolled oats began catching on as breakfast fare, probably because they were economical and satisfying as well as relatively easy to prepare.

(Schumacher eventually became one of the founders of what is now the Quaker Oats Company.)

By 1881, oats had also made their way into baked goods: a book of recipes for commercial bakers called The Complete Bread, Cake and Cracker Baker contained recipe for oats meal muffins, puffs and rolls and a rolled oatmeal-molasses cookie called “oatmeal Snacks” or “Scotch Perkins.”
Presumably Scottish in origin - ginger bread cookies called “parkins” do turn up in old British cookbooks - these snaps may well have been the first oatmeal cookies baked in America.

Only eight years later rolled oatmeal cookies called “Oatmeal Biscuits” debuted in a work for home cooks, Mrs. Clarke’s Cookery Book.

The earliest oatmeal-raisin drip cookie I’ve come across appeared in the Capital City Cook Book, a Madison, Wisconsin, church cookbook published in 1906.

Sometime after 1910, oatmeal cookies edged further into America mainstream when Quaker Oats first put an oatmeal cookie recipe on its box.

While no one paid particular attention then, the public did notice - and vigorously complained - when the company stopped putting oatmeal cookie recipes on its containers in the early 1950s.

The recipes immediate were reinstated, an various oatmeal cookies have been featured in Quaker Oats boxes ever since.

Now, the oatmeal cookie is second in popularity in America only to the chocolate chip.
Oat Cuisine