Society & Culture
I enjoy baking cookies. It gives me great satisfaction to see how my family and friends enjoy the results of my efforts. But the truth is I really do it for the dough. Let’s face it. It’s hard enough to keep your hands out of the cookie jar, but what’s really difficult is keeping your fingers out of the mixing bowl. In fact, the practice of eating raw cookie dough has become so popular that many people buy packaged cookie dough from the grocery store with absolutely no intention of ever baking it. This situation, of course, can be dangerous. The obvious risk is salmonella (named after Daniel E. Salmon in whose lab it was first discovered). It’s found in eggs, a principal ingredient of cookie dough. Yet people keep on eating it. No one can be sure just when people discovered that cookie dough could be just as good as—or better than—cookies themselves. Perhaps it goes back to the very invention of cookie dough which likely predated the invention of the cookie by only a few minutes. The