Oreos in China and the Wafer/Cakey Cookie Divide
Another Wall Street Journal article, this time on the reinvention of the Oreo in China. Of course, international food companies and fast food chains reinvent their products all the time in different countries. But this particular transformation of the Oreo, in the United States traditionally two round chocolate cookies/biscuits sandwiching a white creamy filling, into a long thin not-very-sweet wafer cookie prompted a couple of thoughts.
First, the efforts to persuade the Chinese to adopt the American habit of eating cookies with a glass of milk links nicely to the huge growth of the Chinese dairy industry.
Second, the Chinese are part of the wafer cookie world. Wafer cookies, although known in the US for example, are relatively rare being a minority taste unless they’re used to enclose ice cream. The US is clearly the land of baked cookies that are crisp or cakey but not wafers.
But in lots of places, wafers are preferred. Here in Mexico, for example, the premier cookie maker, Mac’Ma, has a couple of dozen lines of wafers–square and filled, spherical and filled, different shapes, some coated (in the last twenty years they’ve merged with other companies to make chocolates and pasta too but the cookies go back further).
Now both kinds of cookies have European origins, I think. The wafer-type cookies are secularized communion wafers and are related to waffles and other such things. The cakey-biscuit (in the English sense–is there a technical name for this class?) cookies with their mixture of fat, flour, and sugar are very typical of European sweet baked goods.
So how do the geographic divisions between the two run? And why? This might seem a trivial question but such questions usually lead to big divisions between nations, empires, trade routes and the like. Of course Kraft and the other big cookie companies know. It’s just us poor mortals who have to inquire. Any thoughts about which countries like which kind? Or why?
P.S. And in Argentina oreos come filled with dulce de leche!
India is mostly a country of what we call “Biscuits”. These are hardened cookies – the closest description i could attempt. Brittannia and others cell gargantuan quantities of these biscuits in India. People have these with coffee, tea, anytime they are hungry and there are a gazillion varieties available. Cookies are also starting to make a splash recently, thanks to a company called Cookie Man which sells individually packaged, fresh, soft cookies. They are really good.
“Cookie” from the Dutch “koekje” for “little cake” for cakey-biscuits only rather then inclusive of wafer-biscuits?
Any roll of the convents in Mexico with wafer-biscuits? In Europe the wafers at one point were used in a quasi-eucharistic manner from the medieval period onward, but wafers have also moved on from this religious back-ground. Would be interesting if the Mexican versions were closer to the medieval origin.