Now for something a little different in the Christmas cookie department. How about gingersnaps that look like ancient clay tablets? With cuneiform inscriptions.
As Jennifer A Kingson writes at the New York Times, that’s what Katy Blanchard of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology brought to her holiday party a few years ago. Now everyone wants to try it.
“Ms. Blanchard, whose passions are archaeology and baking, used chopsticks, a fish knife and a gingerbread recipe that came packaged with a Coliseum-shaped cookie-cutter she once bought. Not only did her cuneiform cookies beguile her colleagues at the office party, they also gained some measure of internet renown after a Penn Museum publicist posted an article about how she made them. (Sample comment from the public: ‘Mine will probably taste more like the Dead Sea Scrolls.’)
“From there, cuneiform cookies started to become — as the newspaper The Forward put it — ‘a thing.’ Bloggers were enthralled, including one who said she was taking a class in Hittite and opted to practice on shortbread. …
” ‘It really struck the world in just the right nerdy place,’ said Ms. Blanchard, noting that a number of people, including home schooling parents, classroom teachers and scholars of ancient languages, had taken the idea and run with it. …
“Inspired by Ms. Blanchard’s cuneiform cookies, Esther Brownsmith, a Ph.D. student in the Bible and Near East program at Brandeis University who has been studying Akkadian for years, went all out: For a New Year’s party, she baked four tablets of gingerbread, each on a 13-by-18-inch pan, and copied part of the Enuma Elish, a seven-tablet Babylonian creation myth, onto them. A stunning step-by-step description of this feat has drawn thousands of ‘likes on her Tumblr blog.”
More here, at the Times.
Photo: The Forward and Kay Blanchard
The online world is snapping up recipes for these gingerbread cuneiform cookies by Katy Blanchard of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 
Thx for this story! I am always fascinated by ancient forms of writing. –BAM
Me, too. I often wonder how the letters evolved. Were they basically pictograms? I wonder even more today as I try to help Immigrants from other cultures learn our alphabet. They could be fine writers in their home country but now must struggle to begin at the beginning. Then I go back to Suzanne’s house and watch her 4-year-old working on his first letters. (I think there’s a “deep thought” here, but I have yet to verbalize it.)
Dang–I made my gingersnaps one day before you wrote this! It is so totally nerdy–I love it.
Tuck it away for next year. I’d love to see these cookies on your blog!
I could do Scrabble tiles, too–think what fun that could be at a party!
Very creative
What a fun idea!
I hope some reader will try it. My own cookie ambitions don’t go much beyond making the cutout-cookie recipe in the cookbook my son made in nursery school, decades ago. I like to think of 3-year-old John when I mix the dough.
That’s awesome, and really clever. I should do that one day!
I will have to try something like this!