Sugar cookie
A sugar cookie, or sugar biscuit, is a cookie with the main ingredients being sugar, flour, butter, eggs, vanilla, and either baking powder or baking soda. Sugar cookies may be formed by hand, dropped, or rolled and cut into shapes. They may be decorated with additional sugar, icing, sprinkles, or a combination of these. Decorative shapes and figures can be cut into the rolled-out dough using a cookie cutter.
Name
The name Nazareth cookie came from the people of Nazareth, Pennsylvania who came from Germany. The cookie later took on other names in other countries. In England they were called sugar biscuits as well as jumbles.History
Jumbles are the earliest form of sugar cookies. These cookies were contained different spices such as aniseed, coriander, fennel and nutmeg. People used them as Christmas ornaments. People would cut out these sugar cookies into different shapes and hang them on their Christmas tree.Published recipes for the sugar cookie began to appear in the 1800s. Some of these early variations included sour cream or large amounts of milk, in addition or in place of the now-standard ingredients. In 1885, The Boston Globe published a recipe for sugar cookies that omitted liquid dairy ingredients, included baking powder, and had a ratio of one cup of sugar to one half cup of butter.
In the late 1950s, Pillsbury began selling pre-mixed refrigerated sugar cookie dough in US grocery stores, as a type of icebox cookie.