Month: May 2021

Royal Dansk Butter Cookies

Black and white illustration of Royal Dansk Butter Cookies, an Indestructible Food.

“Which came first? The cookie or the tin?”

Royal Dansk butter cookies are iconic. They’re a perfect cookie and the internet is full of memes and reddit threads and think pieces about all the things that folks store in their Royal Dansk tins. If you’re looking to unite humanity around a common treat, these would have to be a contender. So how did these cookies come about, and why do we all love them so much?

Denmark is famous for a lot of things. They invented Legos! They ride bikes all the time! They eat a ton of hot dogs! There’s a lot to love, but the best thing about Denmark is the Danish Butter Cookie. They are a traditional treat made from flour, butter, and sugar–but make no mistake: butter is the star. They aren’t called flour cookies, after all. Or even sugar cookies. They’re BUTTER COOKIES and I think we ought to address how butter became so important to Denmark.

Denmark used to grow and export a ton of grain, but in the late 19th century, Poland, Ukraine, and the Unites States began to flood the market with inventory, and grain prices plummeted. The Danish farmers had to feed the grain they couldn’t sell to their animals. This lead to a great idea: What if Denmark leaned into meat and dairy production instead of growing grain? The land was suited to it. Farmers were willing to give it a try. There was only one problem…

Grain farms don’t magically turn themselves into meat farms. Or dairies. The tools and machinery needed to make this conversion were expensive. So, the farmers formed cooperatives, teaming up to share the financial risks and divide the financial rewards. Soon, Denmark was exporting meat, milk, and butter. The farmers were making money, and high-quality Danish butter was on the map.

Speaking of exports, by 1966, a new cooperative called Royal Dansk was ready to take the international cookie market by storm. They made Danish Butter cookies in five varieties loosely based on traditional favorites:  Finnish Bread, Vanilla Wreaths, Danish Pretzels, Country Style Cookies, and Coconut Rounds. The assortment was novel, but the packaging was revolutionary.

The cookies came IN A TIN. (That’s all caps because it’s so important.) In the 1960s, cookies came in paperboard boxes that were sometimes lined with a waxed paper bag. Then, along comes Royal Dansk selling cookies in a tin?! It was night and day! This was an absolute game-changer!

Not only did the tin elevate the perception of the cookies, it kept the Royal Dansk brand in consumer’s houses, and minds, forever. People had a hard time getting rid of that tin! It was way too nice to throw away! It became home to countless sewing kits. It lived on garage shelves filled with tangles of wire and screws. With a slit cut in the lid, it became a de facto piggy bank. It was advertising that payed off for generations.

Today, for about $4, you can get an assortment of authentic Danish butter cookies, a beautiful tin, and the incredible feeling of well-being that comes with repurposing that tin as a storage container. I really can’t think of a better deal. 

Taco Dinner Kit

Black and. white illustration of and indestructible food: Taco Dinner Kit

“From silver mine to supermarket.”

Picture it. You arrive home after a hard day at school expecting something boring for dinner. Maybe it’ll be a casserole, or meatloaf, or spaghetti and meat sauce. But no…not today. Some cool adult in your house has procured a Taco Dinner Kit, and your family’s ground meat is about to get rad. Just grab a crunchy yellow shell and start building the dinner of your dreams…

The taco kit enriched many a childhood, but we can’t talk about the kit until we talk about the taco. So let’s tacobout it. (I hate this joke. I just couldn’t avoid it.) Anyway, wrapping something delicious in a tortilla is an ancient idea, but calling it a “taco” probably originated in Mexico’s silver mines. “Taco” was the name given to a small explosive charge made of gunpowder wrapped in paper. In the slang-filled world of mining, workers’ lunches (the aforementioned “something delicious wrapped in a tortilla”) became known as tacos. Voila!

Tacos were a great food for workers because they were so portable, and in the 1880s, Mexican workers were on the move. Jobs were opening up in the United States in agriculture, construction, and on the railroad. As workers came from Mexico to fill those jobs, their tacos came with them. Street carts selling Mexican food popped up in cities like LA and San Antonio, and they were drawing crowds. Then, in 1910, the very first taco recipe appeared in an American cookbook. Enterprising cooks could now make tacos at home.

It was a great time to be cooking Mexican food in the US, because the ingredients you needed were suddenly much easier to find. In 1896, a Texan named William Gebhardt bought a bunch of dried chiles and ran them through a meat grinder, thus inventing Chili Powder. Around that same time, canneries in El Paso started churning out tomatoes, green chiles, and pinto beans. A few decades later, canned enchilada sauce and even canned tortillas arrived on the scene. By the 1930s, the very first taco kits began to appear. Americans rejoiced.

The next era in the history of American tacos comes on the heels of Taco Bell. The founder, Glen Bell, was running a hot dog stand in San Bernardino when he noticed that his neighbor’s business had much longer lines than he did. That neighbor was the Mitla Cafe, and they were serving fried tacos. He started eating there every day and trying to reverse engineer their recipe. In the end, they took pity on him and showed him how to make them. He, predictably, turned around and opened his own taco restaurant in 1951. There was some tweaking and experimenting, and then he opened the first Taco Bell in 1962. By 1967, there were 100 of them. Tacos were now on the menu for everyone. (Side note: That original restaurant he learned fried tacos from? It’s still there! Still run by the same family! That makes me happy.)

A lot of Bell’s success stemmed from the fact that he was pre-making hard taco shells. Corn tortillas are delicious, IF you eat them fresh. They are much less delicious if they’ve been sitting around. However, the crunchy fried corn tortilla shell is very shelf-stable. It was easy to warm and fill. It was fun–if messy to eat. And it paved the way for the modern taco kit, one which did not include canned tortillas.

Those stylish new taco kits were in grocery stores around the country by the 70s. In addition to crunchy taco shells, kits included a packet of spices (heavy on the chili powder) and a pouch of sauce. You could add your own protein, veggies and–shoot, this is sort of where our story began…the taco party of your childhood dreams.

A taco dinner kit is about as far from authentic Mexican food as you can get, but it gets folks cooking and eating together, which is awesome. It also does what all indestructible foods do: grants access to folks who wouldn’t otherwise have it, one crunchy yellow shell at a time.