Delectable desserts abound during the holiday season, but you can’t really go wrong with a classic cookie.
The sweet treat comes in many forms and it seems people get even more creative as the holidays roll on. Now, Instagram has taken a look a the most popular cookies across the U.S.
Instagram sourced the data, which was based on the likes and mentions of cookies within the past month that were found in Instagram stories and posts. Facebook’s photo and video-sharing app concluded that the wafers were the favorites for each state.
“The champion cookie flavors included peanut butter, shortbread, crinkle, oatmeal, sugar cookies, gingerbread, snickerdoodles and the classic chocolate chip, which surprisingly only reigned popularity in Illinois,” Instagram said in an email.
Credit: Instagram
Credit: Instagram
While many debate about oatmeal raisin and chocolate chip cookies, Instagram’s data show that the former is the winner of the two.
Cookies famously tied to the holidays — including sugar-dusted chocolate crinkle cookies, soft and chewy cinnamon-sugar dusted snickerdoodles and clove and molasses-filled gingerbread men — can be found on the map.
Georgia favored gingerbread as did California, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Utah.
Although gingerbread is known as a cookie today, it wasn’t linked to desserts until the 15th century. Before then, gingerbread didn’t mean a cookie — in medieval England, it meant preserved ginger, PBS reported.
Grecians developed the first known gingerbread recipe in 2400 B.C. and Chinese recipes followed in the 10th century. Europeans developed their version of gingerbread by the late Middle Ages.
As for how the hard cookies came to be decorated, historians credit Queen Elizabeth I with the idea after she reportedly had some made in the likeness of the dignitaries who visited her court.
English colonists brought gingerbread to the Western Hemisphere and the first American cookbook, Amelia Simmons’ “American Cookery,” has recipes for three kinds of gingerbread — the soft, loaf variety included, which was more common in America.
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