Why Do We Dunk Cookies in Milk? 🍪

Good morning cookie monster!

Remember the good ol’ days?

When you’d:

• Rewind your VHS tapes before watching them again
• Collect Beanie Babies
• Call people by their racial slur

Me too.

But there’s one more thing I used to do that got me wondering why we do this dirty dirty thing in the first place.

So I’ll lay out my deep, dark secret to you – dear reader – right here….right now:

‘Why…

…do we dunk cookies in milk?’

I know, I know…

Disgusting. Heinous. Even downright abominable.

But it wasn’t always this way.

See in 753 BC this strange habit started to appear when a she-wolf – yes a she-wolf – found two abandoned infants on the bank of the Tiber River.

Their names were Romulus and Remus. Twins of a Vestal Virgin and Mars, the god of war.

Don’t ask me what a Vestal Virgin is.

Or what she was doing with a God for that matter…

It sounds not right.

So anyway, the twins are left out to die on the river.

And thankfully our she-wolf suckled them back to health.

Now as Romulus and Remus grew older, they became warriors and overthrew some important people.

This granted them the right to found a new city on the banks of their sacred birthplace – the Tiber River.

But, remember, they’re twins.

So they bickered a lot.

About stuff like which of the two river hills they’d build their city on.

Romulus voted for the hill on the left — The Palatine Hill.

Remus voted for the hill on the right — The Aventine Hill.

It was a tie. And every tie needs a tie-breaker.

Luckily Romulus and Remus had the ability to consult the Gods on the matter.

And they decided that the Gods would speak through the flight of birds.

Lol.

Yep, Romulus saw 12 birds on his hill.

Remus, only six.

Womp womp wommmpppp.

Yep, Romulus chopped Remus’ head off because he jumped over his wall.

And without a twin brother he could now be the sole ruler of his new walled city – Rome.

Okay, that was just me indulging in the silly story of how Rome came to be.

But around the same time something curious starts happening in town.

Look:

The snack-of-choice at the time – the hard wafer – was simply too hard.

So Romulus gets a little smarter:

Dipping a hard wafer in wine made them palatable!

And this tradition endured for millennia.

Then dunking-hard-things-in-liquid made its way to the home of the free and the land of the brave – America.

And we Americans – with our acquired taste for trans fats – started to notice something magical that happened when you dunked a chocolate chip cookie in fatty milk:

1. The fat in milk helps dissolve flavor molecules.
2. Then – because it’s a liquid – it acts as a delivery vehicle to spread those molecules all over your taste buds.
3. Now you have deep, rich, chocolate-chip-cookie-milk-mix sloshing around your mouth. It’s an intense, flavorful symphony!

And, I bet you want some cookies and milk now 😉.

So while you go digging in the pantry for those Chips Ahoy (are you team crunchy or chewy?), make sure you thank the Romans and that bizarre she-wolf that started a cookie-dipping empire.

Stay Cute,
Henry & Dylan 🌈

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