Why Do We Dunk Cookies in Milk? 🍪
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Good morning cookie monster!
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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?’
![](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/649aa49e57793ed61ecbd3fd/64dad3f972f4b4840e21cbc8_111.webp)
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.
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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.
![](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/649aa49e57793ed61ecbd3fd/64dad3f9f1017f516fa9bd90_3_1.webp)
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.
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Remus voted for the hill on the right — The Aventine Hill.
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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.
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Yep, Romulus saw 12 birds on his hill.
Remus, only six.
Womp womp wommmpppp.
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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.
![](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/649aa49e57793ed61ecbd3fd/64dad3fa86467f646d2fc04e_16_1.webp)
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:
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![](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/649aa49e57793ed61ecbd3fd/64dad3faa2857283e34198d9_18_1.webp)
![](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/649aa49e57793ed61ecbd3fd/64dad3fbbf50b734a9aaf108_19_1.webp)
The snack-of-choice at the time – the hard wafer – was simply too hard.
So Romulus gets a little smarter:
![](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/649aa49e57793ed61ecbd3fd/64dad3fbbf50b734a9aaf10c_20_1.webp)
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Dipping a hard wafer in wine made them palatable!
And this tradition endured for millennia.
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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:
- The fat in milk helps dissolve flavor molecules.
- Then – because it’s a liquid – it acts as a delivery vehicle to spread those molecules all over your taste buds.
- 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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