Even homemade cookie snobs will go to the store for Oreos

Country-western tunes are by nature plaintive, but there's no tune more mournful to me than the one Paul David Wells sings. "I'm down to my last Oreo," it goes, "playing with the cellophane." Not even "You Done Tore Out My Heart and Stomped that Sucker Flat" is more moving.

Yes, I'm addicted to Oreos. As an admitted homemade cookie snob, they're the one store-bought cookie I'll eat (OK, devour!) And I'm not the only one. They are, after all, America's favorite cookie and the best seller in the world. So many are sold annually, in fact, that their crème filling alone would amply cover all the wedding cakes served in the United States over the course of a year. That's even more impressive when you realize that an Oreo cookie is only 29 percent crème.

Nearly eight billion Oreos are consumed each year, over 20 million a day. For perspective, it would take a stack of only 15,000 of them to reach the top of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. All the Oreos sold to date stacked in a pile would reach to the moon and back --five times! No wonder Carl Icahn launched a takeover bid for Oreo's manufacturer, Nabisco, last year. Fortunately for those who would hate to see the company become the TWA of snack brands, smarter cookies prevailed.

The story-o of Oreos

The dominance of Oreos is all the more remarkable when you realize that it was not the first chocolate cookie with crème filling on the market. That distinction goes to the Hydrox cookie. It debuted in 1908, four years before the Oreo. But its maker, Sunshine Biscuits, was no match for Nabisco's superior distribution channels and advertising budgets. Ironically, the Hydrox cookie exists no more. It was morphed into something called Droxies when Keebler merged with Sunshine in 1996.

The Hydrox name, incidentally, was derived from abbreviations for hydrogen and oxygen, the components of water. Sunshine's founders thought water was a logical concomitant of sunshine, conveying purity.

The source of the word Oreo, on the other hand, is obscure. Even Nabisco isn't sure how it originated. One theory says the term derives from the French word for gold, "or," since the cookies initially came in gold-colored packages. Another explanation holds that since Oreos were originally hill-shaped, they were given the Greek word for mountain, "oreo." Still another hypothesis maintains that the term was created much like the cookie itself -- by removing the "re" from crème and sandwiching it between two "O's" representing either the shape of the cookie or the two "O's" in chocolate.

However it got its name, the Oreo was merely one of three cookies introduced by Nabisco in 1912 to satisfy demand for English-style "biscuits." The other two, Mother Goose and Veronese, have long since disappeared, but Oreo now dominates the company's product line. In 1974 Oreo Double Stuf cookies, with twice the crème filling, debuted, followed in 1987 by fudge-covered Oreos and in 1990 by white fudge covered Oreos.

Apparently unable to leave well enough alone, Nabisco also makes Oreos with colored fillings, including orange for Halloween, red and green for Christmas, and sky blue for spring. Only the color of the crème is affected, not the taste. But recently Oreos with cocoa-flavored filling have premiered, marking the first flavor change in the cookie's history.

For purists only the standard version will do and we are even set in our ways about how we eat them. Surveys indicate that 35 percent of consumers twist open their Oreos before eating them. Women are more likely to be twisters than men. Some 30 percent of consumers prefer dunking their Oreos. They are more likely to be men than women. Moreover, certain areas of the country favor one method over the other. Thus, New York, Las Vegas and Nashville are cities where twisting is heavily practiced, whereas Chicago, Philadelphia, Buffalo and New Orleans are cities into dunking.

By the way, dunkers can be creative. Besides the old standby of milk, they have been known to immerse their Oreos in hot chocolate, coffee, marshmallow crème, peanut butter, ice cream, whipped cream and, during the holidays, eggnog. I recommend Kahlua.

Fact Oreo fiction?

Your preferred method of eating Oreos, according to some facetious psychologists, reveals insights into your personality, a sort of culinary Rorschach test. For example, it has been suggested that dunkers obviously like to sugarcoat their experiences and may be in denial, while those who eat the whole cookie all at once are plainly carefree and reckless. As for twisters, those who break apart the cookie and eat the inside first are evidently naturally curious people who take pleasure in tearing things apart to see how they work. Of course, given the fact that they also destroy the evidence of their investigations, they may have a Machiavellian streak. On the other hand, twisters who break apart the cookie and just eat the crème filling reveal themselves to be greedy and selfish people who take what they want and throw the rest away. Twisters who break the cookie apart, discard the filling and eat only the cookie are clearly masochists.

I doubt that even Freud would endorse such psychoanalysis, though I trust he would have agreed with me that those who don't like Oreos at all are in desperate need of therapy. One way to treat them is by using Oreos as an ingredient in other recipes. Chopped up, the cookie goes well in cheesecakes, bread pudding, parfaits, pancakes, brownies, cakes, pies, banana bread and even other cookies, like biscotti. That's the way I like to see the cookie crumble.

Listen to A Harte Appetite Friday mornings and Saturday afternoons on KRCU, 90.9 on your FM dial. Write A Harte Appetite, c/o the Southeast Missourian, P.O. Box 699, Cape Girardeau, Mo., 63702-0699 or by e-mail to tharte@semissourian.com.