One Cookie, Two Versions
Why Girl Scout S’mores won’t all be the same
After 100 years of selling cookies, the Girl Scouts have come up with two new flavours. It may seem odd that it took a century when the inspiration was right under their noses — s’mores. The Girl Scouts first published a recipe for the quintessential campfire snack in 1927.
The two newcomers share the same name — Girl Scout S’mores — but play separate variations on the theme of chocolate, marshmallow and graham cracker. In a bit of hairsplitting worthy of a merit badge for marketing, one is billed as “crispy” and the other as “crunchy”.
The crispy cookie is a thick slab of graham cracker coated with a fine layer of sweet white frosting and a much thicker one of chocolate, produced by ABC Bakers, of Richmond, Virginia. The crunchy cookie is a graham sandwich filled with a layer of chocolate and another of marshmallow-like icing, produced by Little Brownie Bakers, of Louisville, Kentucky.
Why two versions? The Girl Scouts need two manufacturers to meet the demand for 2 million boxes of cookies a year; presented with the idea for S’mores, each bakery took its own approach. As connoisseurs know, there are regional variations in the popular Thin Mints, and strong similarities between Samoas and Caramel deLites.
Neither of the S’mores has been seared over embers under the stars, as prescribed in that 1927 recipe for “Some More”. But early taste-tests online, and among The New York Times’
Food staff, showed a slight preference for the sandwich cookie, for its balanced sweetness and tender, fudge-like centre.
Girl Scout-cookie season typically opens in January and ends in April, though each local council has its own traditions, which means that a lone council in Michigan and one in Maryland were selling cookies last fall.
Timing and availability of the new offerings will vary, since councils in different parts of the country have contracts with different manufacturers. Councils in Los Angeles and New York will sell the sandwich cookies, while those in Philadelphia and Orange County, California, will sell the chocolate-coated grahams. This may not matter to Thin Mint purists, but not every council will have a S’mores cookie on the menu.
In 1922, Florence E. Neil, a Girl Scout director in Chicago, published a recipe for sugar cookies flavoured with vanilla, and many of the earliest Girl Scout cookies sold to raise funds for activities and community projects were baked in home kitchens, based on Neil’s recipe. But the first Girl Scout-cookie sale took place even earlier, in 1917, in a high-school cafeteria in Muskogee, Oklahoma.
Since then, this business has expanded to become a national phenomenon, with devoted fans buying cult flavours in bulk, or stashing extra boxes in the freezer to last until the next cookie season. This hoarding surely contributes to the average US$800 million (28 billion baht) in sales each season.
Whether the cookies are pre-ordered for home delivery, or picked up at booths in parking lots, fairgrounds and grocery stores, every council handles the process in its own way.
Early taste-tests online have showed a slight preference for the crunchy, sandwich cookie, for its balanced sweetness and tender, fudgelike centre