Picture this: Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass team up with Tim Burton to make a dystopian stop motion animation holiday special. Charleton Heston voices the character of Robbie Thorn, inspector for the Christmastown Police Department. Christmastown is overpopulated with elves and other cartoon characters. Resources are running dangerously low. How are we going to feed everyone? Inspector Thorn stumbles upon a dark secret- Gingerbread are Elves!
Luckily we aren’t in the year 2022 when the movie Soylent Green supposedly takes place. Our gingerbread cookies are people but only in their shape, not their ingredients!
According to the Larousse Gastronomique, which touts itself as the world’s greatest culinary encyclopedia, the seashell shape that the cookie is baked in is “attributed to Avice, chef of Tallyrand, the French Statesman, who had the idea of baking a pound-cake mixture in aspic moulds.” There are other schools of thought of where the idea came from – one that it originated much earlier in the French town of Commercy. A duke was visiting there in 1755 and was quite taken with a cookie baked by a local peasant girl named, wait for it…. Madeleine. No matter what the true origin, this cookie is delicious!
