For such a ubiquitous cookie, the name’s origins are quite mysterious. Various etymologies have been given for the Oreo’s name, though none are conclusive: Tom Diorio, a likely fictitious employee of Nabisco’s, suggested the recipe, following one of his family’s old recipes (a clear case of giving an upstart biscuit a fake pedigree, I think!).
It’s also possible that Oreo comes from “d’or,” French for gold, because the Oreo’s first packaging had the name printed in gold. A Nabisco spokesman suggested in the 1980s that the company’s first chairman, Adolphus Green, was a classical scholar, and so named the cookie after the ancient Greek word for mountain (oros). That is perhaps the likeliest explanation, since the first cookies were shaped like mounds.
Ferran Adrià has created an Oreo starter – albeit one that’s savoury (black olive biscuit bracketing crème fraiche) rather than sweet: once again the tongue confounds the eye. At Hong Kong’s Mandarin Grill + Bar, Oreo was our best selling dessert: made with oreo crumbles, topped with vanilla ice cream, and finally hot chocolate foam channelled through a siphon. The foam would melt the ice cream and turn the plate into a chocolate sea. A winner for the eyes and the mouth.
Oreo is the most popular biscuit around the world; its parent company Nabisco sells almost 7.5 billion cookies every year! In the France of my childhood, the most popular biscuits were the Prince (chocolate filled between two biscuit rings stamped with a Prince figure), Paille d’Or (raspberry filled Golden Stray) and Le Petit Écolier (The Little Schoolboy, a butter biscuit with chocolate on top). All three are produced by Lefèvre-Utile (LU), a manufacturer based in Nantes, now owned by Krafts Food.
What’s your favourite biscuit?