Christmas cookies come in all forms – from complex spiced gingerbread, to elaborately iced cookies. But one of my favorites is the most simple of them all and it’s a true American classic – the Butterscotch Haystack. It has only three ingredients – butterscotch morsels, chow mein noodles and Spanish peanuts. And, it’s what is known as a drop cookie – it requires no baking. It only needs to be melted, mixed and dropped onto a cooling surface. No pastry skills are needed, and only some assembly required. Ok, it may not be as sophisticated as springerle or lebkuchen, but it offers a superb bang for the buck. It has both the crunchy and the creamy; the salty and the sweet – all in one delicious bite. And its history spans an encyclopedic volume of American confectionery history.
My maternal grandmother made them around Christmas time in the 70s and 80s, and my sister-in-law and niece make them today at Christmas. They’re super-addicting and satisfying. They have that cracker jack or popcorn ball appeal. You could eat several of them at a baseball game or while watching your favorite holiday movie.
The story behind the Haystack is the favorite food sleuthing I’ve done in 2021. The CSI in my research yielded a great story – so much so, that I believe it deserves its own documentary. The nativity story spans over a century and traces American baking history from coal fired stoves through mass produced industrial products to food mass marketing and postwar and pre-60s liberation movements convenience. It also touches on the Cereal Wars and the Chop Suey and Chinese food craze. Its inventors formed an army of men and women including a religious zealot-turned cereal manufacturer, two entrepreneurial housewives, two corporate culinarians, a Korean entrepreneur, an ad agency exec, and a Swiss chocolatier. It’s amazing there’s all this history wrapped up in one small, simple cookie.
The Spanish peanut of course is truly the American confectionery ingredient from our very beginnings. It’s cultivated here, and can be seen in our earliest nut drop confections like the Goo Goo Cluster – America’s oldest candy bar, and a whole slew of other American nut-laden candy bars. Nut clusters, starting with peanut brittle, became an American obsession. Mullane’s Candy Company in Cincinnati even made a nut cluster with peanuts and a total of 12 other nut varieties called the Woodland Goodie, in the early 1900s. In the 1950s, Doscher candies, for a brief period made a Goo Goo Cluster knockoff called the Goober Cluster. And although the Spanish Peanut was our de facto American confectionery nut for over a century, the American Confectioners’ Association study of 2019 reports that the almond has finally surpassed the peanut as the most popular confectionery nut, at least in high end chocolate confections.
To credit this cookie, we need to recognize the inventor of each ingredient – starting with W. K. Kellogg, Mary Barber, Henri Nestle, Ruth Wakefield , Ilan New, Eunice Serles, Samuel Gale, and an anonymous corporate culinarian behind the fictional Betty Crocker who first put it all together in the early 1960s.
The cookie story starts with a happy accident in a religious sanitarium, and not with chow mein noodles but corn flakes. With a sixth-grade education and six years as a traveling broom salesman, W.K. Kellogg had gone to work at the Battle Creek (Michigan) Sanitarium where his brother John Harvey Kellogg was the chief physician. The sanitarium was affiliated with the Kelloggs’ Seventh Day Adventist Church and, therefore, had a vegetarian kitchen.
The brothers spent years trying to improve the patients’ diet. In 1894, while trying to make a wheat-based granola, W.K. accidentally left a pot of boiled wheat to stand for too long. Though the grain was softened and seemingly stale, he went ahead and put it through the usual rolling process. Rather than creating a sheet of dough, each grain came out as a thin flake that the brothers then baked. And so, breakfast cereal was born. In 1906, W.K Kellogg went into the business and Americans tasted Corn Flakes cereal for the first time.
In 1923, W.K. Kellogg hired Mary Barber to set up one of the industry’s first professional home economics departments to develop recipes using the company’s cereals and provide consumer information on diet and nutrition. Corn flakes would eventually find their way on top of mid-century casseroles like tuna noodle and creamed chicken, but it first found its way into confections.
The first recipe using Kellogg’s Corn Flakes as an ingredient appeared on the side of a cereal box in 1932. The company’s home economics department developed the recipe under the guidance of Ms. Barber and called it Kellogg’s Corn Flakes Macaroons:
- 2 egg whites, room temperature
- 1/8 teaspoon cream of tartar
- 1 cup confectioners’ sugar
- 1 cup coconut, shredded
- 2 cups Corn Flakes Cereal
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
This was sort of a take on perhaps the chewy oatmeal cookie, but was a way to increase sales of Kellogg’s cereals. The confection took off, particularly in the Southern United States. Other varieties began to appear, like Texas Delight cookies which included corn flakes, oatmeal, pecans and coconut.
As Post and General Mills Cereals came on the market, they too promoted recipes for confections using their cereals. Chex, Cap’n Crunch, Wheaties, Cocoa Krispies, Corn and Cocoa Puffs and even Trix Cereal would find their way into this new family of American confection. Kimbles, a company out of Georgia makes a single packaged old fashioned corn flake candy that sold on QVC.
The chocolate chip came into play almost 20 years after the first corn flake confection entered our American Sweet Tooth.
Nestle was started by Henry Nestle, a pharmacist in Vevey, Switzerland in 1866. He first produced baby formula and condensed milk. The product slogan was, “When the stork has brought the baby, Nestle’s food will keep the baby.” Nestle got into the chocolate candy business in 1929 with the purchase of Cailler and Swiss General. And it was another happy accident by an East Coast housewife that brought us the chocolate chip.
In the mid-1930s, Ruth Wakefield, a proprietress of the Toll House Inn, was experimenting with a cookie to lure in customers. She cut a bar of Nestlé’s’ Semi-Sweet Chocolate into tiny pieces and added them to the cookie recipe. The chocolate bits softened to a creamy texture in the baked cookies and Mrs. Wakefield named her delicious discovery Toll House Cookies (they were originally called chocolate crunch cookies) and that was the beginning of Nestlé’s Chocolate Chips as we know them today.
In 1939 the Toll House Restaurant and the Toll House Cookie were featured on Betty Crocker’s popular radio show, “Famous Foods from Famous Places,” and interest in the new cookie spread from New England to the rest of the country. Nestle bought exclusive rights to the recipe and the use of the Toll House Name from the Wakefields in 1939. They started to sell the semisweet chocolate bars with little score marks in the chocolate so people could cut the pieces in just the right size. Then, in 1940, Nestle introduced the Toll House morsels (chocolate chips) so that bakers would not have to chip off bits of chocolate with an ice pick (thus the common name: chocolate chip).
Next comes the invention of the American chow mein noodle. Real chow mein noodles from Northern China are hand strung, boiled and fried in a wok so that they’re not a cracker, but crunchy on the outside and still chewy on the inside. But you can’t can and preserve that. La Choy Food Products Inc., the first American maker of the chow mein noodle, is the oldest and most successful American-based producer of shelf stable Asian food products. The company still holds more than 40 percent market share of the Asian food market, with its closest rival Chun King maintaining about a 20 percent market share.
La Choy was the brainchild of two friends, Wally Smith and Ilhan New. The two men met and developed a close friendship while students at the University of Michigan during the early years of the 20th century, and both had become successful businessmen. Smith, an American who owned his own grocery store in Detroit, Michigan, wanted to sell fresh-grown bean sprouts to bring a more varied product line to his customers. He consulted his old friend New, a Korean by birth, and asked him if he knew how to grow them. New said he did, and the two men came up with the idea of canning bean sprouts in glass jars. This innovative idea was so successful that Smith and New decided to incorporate their own business, La Choy Food Products Company, in 1922, and to use metal to can a variety of Asian vegetables in addition to bean sprouts.
Although New left the company for personal reasons in 1930 and Smith was killed by lightning in 1937, the company continued to flourish. By the late 1930s management at the firm developed a comprehensive line of food products, including bean sprouts, La Choy soy sauce, sub-kum, kumquats, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, brown sauce, and our chow mein noodles.
But when did the Butterscotch Morsel come in? In 1959 the Cincinnati Post had an article about a new interest in butterscotch– “Several years ago a large food processing company (Nestle) introduced butterscotch morsels but it took a modest little woman baking an extra good cake with butterscotch morsels in the filling to put them on the map. Ever since that cake won $25,000 in a recent national baking contest, homemakers have been discovering butterscotch morsel chips.” That modest little woman was Mrs. Eunice Surles of Lake Charles, Louisiana, and that extra good cake was her Mardi Gras Party Cake, which won her the title of the 11th Pillsbury Bake Off in 1959. When she won that hearty prize, she also popularized the new Nestle Butterscotch morsel.
Bake-offs were the mid-century precursor to the network and streaming cooking challenge shows of today, like the Great British Baking show and the Christmas Cookie Challenge. Where now we can get any recipe variation from searching Pinterest, back mid-century women looked to the Bakeoffs and championships for innovative new recipes.
In 1963 Betty Crocker published the first edition of the Cooky Book: A Complete Collection – for All Occasions and Tastes. This is the King James version of the Bible for American cookies. It sure was the bible for my family. It contains the recipes for our family’s standard Christmas cookies – the Mexican wedding cookie, the thumbprint, and our peanut butter cookie. It even has the laborious recipe for peppermint candy cane cookies my mother made once for Christmas. The appendix contains seven decades of the popular American cookies with their origin story and historical perspective of that decade. It’s a food etymologists’s dream.
But to add to this story it contains on page 133, the second to last page of the cookbook, the no-bake drop cookie section, which contains none other than the Haystack family tree. It starts with the Grandmother to ours, the Ting-A-Ling. Betty Crocker smartly removed the egg whites and coconut from the now 30 year old Kellogg Cornflake Macaroon recipe and replaced Kellogg’s Corn Flakes with their own General Mills owned Wheaties or Cheerios cereal (your choice), added chocolate morsels, and tramp stamped it the Ting-A-ling. It then links them to the intermediary mother cookie, the chocolate chip Noodle Cluster and finally to our Butterscotch Haystack.
It was a brilliant marketing scheme. A simple easily made cookie was the perfect avenue to increase sales of Nestle’s newly created butterscotch morsel, – no pastry skills required. And, it catapulted the La Chow Chow Mein Noodle into a whole other market. It was not just for chow mein Chinese food anymore – it could be integrated as a crunch element into confectionery and would also find its way onto “Mandarin Salads” and some horrible jello salads of the 60s and 70s. It was genius, straight out of an episode of Mad Men that that 1950s Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency would have come up with.
At their creation in 1963 these Haystacks were streamlined version of the earlier corn flake cookie – America was getting rid of our baggage from the McCarthian 50s and heading into the upheaval of the late 60s with the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s and Gay Liberation Movements. We were cleaning house to move on to the next phase of the American experiment and it all is evident in this one cookie. And Betty Crocker, or General Mills was leading the charge with three pages of drop cookies at the end of its cooky bible.
Betty Crocker of course isn’t a real person, although General Mills smartly personified her in voice, television, and print. She was the result of another happy accident. Ms. Crocker was the brainchild of an advertising campaign developed by the Washburn-Crosby Company, a flour milling company started in the late 1800s that eventually became General Mills. Gold Medal Flour, a product of Washburn-Crosby, helped to kick-start Betty’s career. She was born in 1921, when an ad for Gold Medal Flour was placed in the Saturday Evening Post. The ad featured a puzzle of an American main street scene. Contestants were encouraged to complete the puzzle and send it in for the prize of a pincushion in the shape of a sack of Gold Medal Flour.
The response was overwhelming; around 30,000 completed puzzles flooded the Washburn-Crosby offices. Many of the completed puzzles were accompanied by letters filled with baking questions and concerns, something the Washburn-Crosby Company had never anticipated. Previously, the companys small advertising department had dealt with customer mail and questions. The department manager, Samuel Gale, and his all-male staff would consult the women of the Gold Medal Home Service staff with customers baking and cooking questions. Gale never felt completely comfortable signing his name to this advice, as he suspected that women would rather hear from other women who knew their way around a kitchen. The pile of questions pouring in from the puzzle contest reinforced the need for a female cooking authority, somebody who could gracefully answer any kitchen questions that customers might have. The department’s answer to this issue was to invent a female chief of correspondence, a fictitious woman they named Betty Crocker.
The Betty Crocker cookie cookbook only notes a handful of women on the General Mills Home Economics Staff for credit on specific cookies. The team of women culinarians called out throughout the cookbook were Helen Halbert, director (Florentines), Ruth Anderson, former editor of Betty Crocker Cookbooks (St. Lawrence cookie), Esther Roth (Peanut Mallow Clusters), Ann Burckhardt (pfeffernuse), Katherine Burgford (Scandinavian Krumkake), Diana Williams (Coconut-Chocolate Meringue Bites), Loyta Higgins (Gateu Bonbons) and Marcia McMullen, an intern from OSU at the time (Cheese Swirl Brownies). No one is named as the originator of the chow mein noodle addition, but I’d like to think it’s Ms. Roth, whose cookie credit is part of the family of crunchy drop cookies.
We may never know whose idea it was to include the chow mein noodle into the Butterscotch Haystack in 1963, but we certainly have a long line of inventors leading up to it. Whomever that American Haystack Queen was, I’d like to give thanks to her this holiday season.
dannwoellertthefoodetymologist 
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