The term “Chocolate Chip Cookie” certainly refers to a specific kind of cookie and not simply any cookie that has chocolate chips in it, so don’t any of you start giving me a hard time pretending that you don’t know what I mean or that I haven’t provided enough information, you know damn well what I mean. (And to those of you across the pond: Don’t even start with your “Chocolate Chip Biscuits”, I don’t want to hear it.)
Basically, I want to know what kind of cookie the cookie part of a chocolate chip cookie is. If you were to follow the same recipe but leave out the chocolate chips what would you call the result?
I’d call it a drop cookie, as opposed to a rolled or bar or pressed cookie. Try it with chopped walnuts and minced dried cranberries, one of my favorites.
No, no, no AngelicGemma, the only thing chocolate about a chocolate chip cookie is the chocolate chips! The cookie part is not chocolate- that would be a chocolate choclate chip cookie (which are also very good!).
You folks are of an unfortunate culture aren’t you.
‘chocolate chip’ doesn’t tell you anything about what kind of dough the cookie is made of, only that it has chocolate chips (as opposed to peanut butter or toffee chips). If the cookie is also chocolate, you add an extra ‘chocolate’ to the name, hence ‘chocolate chocolate chip cookie’.
Well here in the UK we call the ones that have chocolatey dough as well as the chocolate chips “double chocolate chip cookies” (not biscuits, not even here). A neat way of avoiding the repetition of “chocolate”, I think you’ll agree.
Anyway, I’m sticking with butter cookies. They’re made with butter, and brown sugar, and other healthy stuff. Mmm-mm.
I used to call chocolate chocolate-chip cookies double chocolate-chip cookes until double chocolate-chip cookes took to meaning a chcolate-chip cookie with twice the amout of chcoloate chips.
I was surprised to learn on a recent business trip to the UK that the word cookie is used there. I was under the impression that it wasn’t.
A discussion about trivial cultural differences got into the whole cookie/biscuit area. Here’s what the guy from Bedfordshire explained to me (maybe other parts of the country differ a little):
The word “biscuit” is applied to many kinds of goods, some sweet, some salty. But it only applies if it’s crunchy or hard. Since a chocolate chip cookie is chewy (it damned well better be), it’s called a “chocolate chip cookie.” He also said that if he were naming any generic soft cookie, he might call it an “American cookie.” I think he might have been pulling my chain. And it made me wonder what an English cookie is.
I did, however, eat some “American donuts” from Sainsbury’s. They were mostly authentic…but the box was all raspberry jelly-filled donuts, and all covered in granulated sugar. Real American donuts come in different varieties, I don’t really care for jelly-filled that much, and powdered sugar kicks granulated’s ass anyday. We do them better over here, anyway. Krispy Kreme, anyone?
One more little aside. The biscuit conversation prompted me to ask what word they used for what I would call a biscuit. I almost made his head explode as I tried to describe a buttermilk biscuit. “Like a scone?” “A dumpling?” I just couldn’t quite get him to understand what it was. I later found that even though KFC is popular in England, that they don’t even have biscuits! (Yeah, that one made me develop a tic. What are you people eating with your fried chicken?!) So what was said above about an unfortunate culture might be true…solely because there aren’t any “real” biscuits.
Put another way, in the phrase “chocolate chip cookie,” the word “chocolate” modifies the word “chip,” not the word “cookie.”
If you have two components (“chip” and “cookie”), you’d want two modifiers to lessen confusion about which component was being modified. Hence the nested phrase, “chocolate chocolate chip cookie.”
You could, of course simplify this to the expresson “chocolate(chip + cookie),” but that would be harder to express verbally.
Chocolate chip cookies are not supposed to be chewy! A proper chocolate chip cookie is chewy while hot, but unless they’re undercooked I don’t recall any chocolate chip cookie recipe worth a damn where you end up with chewy cookies once they’ve cooled off. They should not be hard, but they should be crisp or crunchy.
I usually refer to them as “chipless chocolate chip cookies,” but I like the “chocolate zip cookie” idea. And yes, I like them that way. Although truth be told, it usually just gets eaten in dough form around my house.
The term “chocolate chocolate chip cookie” not only distinguishes the cookie from a chocolate chip cookie with the amount of chips in the recipe doubled, it enables the seller to repeat the siren-song word “chocolate,” thereby reeling in more addicts.
