America’s First Homemade Cookies

During the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries most cookies were made in home kitchens. They mainly were baked as special treats because of the cost of sweeteners and the amount of time and labor required for preparation. The most popular of these early cookies still retain their prize status. Recipes for jumbles, a spiced butter cookie, and for macaroons, based on beaten egg whites and almonds, were common in the earliest American cookbooks. Simmons provided a recipe for “Tumbles” in American Cookery, and recipes for both “Jumbals” and “Macaroone” are included in Mary Randolph’s The Virginia House-Wife (1824).