Gourmet's Favorite Cookies, 1941-2008

The recently deceased Gourmet Magazine has kept up their website to a surprising extent, which makes me wonder if rumors of its death may have been greatly exaggerated.  But I digress.  Recently they went through their entire magazine archives, and pulled out their favorite cookie recipe for each year of the magazine's publication.  

(By the sounds of it, they actually bake and taste tested each recipe, then voted on the best for each year, which if you think about it must have been quite a formidable enterprise.  Did they do this after the layoffs?  Or is this something they had been working on for a while before the magazine was shuttered?  Or was it a labor of love among employees who knew they would soon have to hit the pavement, but wanted to get in one last group project?)

It's fascinating to read through the decades and watch how our tastes have changed over the years.  Frankly I find a lot of the early cookie recipes to be somewhat unappealing.  The texture "crunchy" is over represented, and most of the recipes are flavored very simply.  I had to laugh at the comment on the 1940s recipe Date Bars, "these Russian-style treats will remind you of something your grandmother would have made."  For better or worse.

A lot of the cookies are so un-cookie-like that I wonder if cookies weren't put in the same mental category as crackers, back in the World War II era.  Most of them look more like sweet crackers than cookies to me, with their emphasis on form over flavor.  And on the use of dates, from the Date Bars themselves to the Scotch Oat Crunches.  (Despite the recipe's assurance that you can fill them with anything, several commenters have mentioned that their grandmother made these all the time - with date filling, of course.)  Maybe dates were considered a fancy whimsical treat in the 1940s, but by this point they are so closely associated with "digestive regularity" that it's a big obstacle in the adoption of a cookie recipe.

Now fast forward to the 1980s, an era that I associate Gourmet Magazine with most closely.  It seems like the 1980s were the aspirational heyday of magazines like Gourmet, and I can picture them laid out all glossy in a fan across many a black lacquer tabletop.  I had to laugh when I saw the 1980s recipes, because they are so filled with excess, just as you would expect them to be.  Although the Brown Sugar Ginger Crisps are a welcome throwback recipe to the earlier years, most of the 1980s recipes include at least three different "main ingredients," all of which compete vigorously for attention on the stage.  Chocolate, toffee, AND cashews!  Miniature pecan pie cookies!  Some kind of chocolate bourbon truffle!

The ingredient listings aren't exact enough, but I don't half suspect that the caloric value per cookie increases steadily over the decades.  As did the average caloric value per American, if you follow me.  

Maybe we were better off in the 1940s when dates were apparently a special treat?  

Nah.