- Title
- Our State
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-
- Date
- December 2012
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-
- Place
- ["North Carolina, United States"]
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Our State
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GOOD FOOD
BAKERY
Sweetest History Lesson
Crumbly, thin, andfragile, Moravian cookies pack a lot into a little disk.
BY LEAH HUGHES | PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOEY AND JESSICA SEAWELL
Ybu can’t sneak a Moravian cookie.
The plastic package crinkles when
you pull one from the tube. The cookie
crunches when you bite down. And if
you’re not careful, that bite will leave a trail
of crumbs down your shirt.
The ginger spice Moravian cookie
made by Salem Baking Company in
Winston-Salem has 32 scalloped ridges
around its edge. It measures two inches
across, and it’s thin. Really thin. Salem
Baking’s signature product only measures
one millimeter in height. But that cookie
— whisper thin, crumbly, and fragile —
helped build a company with a reputation
82 years strong. And every cookie that
rolls off the line from the Salem Baking
plant carries a centuries-old story.
As Europeans began traveling the
world, they brought back sugar and spices,
such as vanilla, cinnamon, and ginger.
Their traditional foods found new flavors
with every trip. When the Moravians came
from Europe to America, they brought
their newfound flavors with them in the
form of cookies. In 1766, they settled in
the community of Salem, near present-
day Winston-Salem, and continued
making Moravian cookies here. But the
spices were exotic and expensive, so they
prepared the cookies only on holidays and
special occasions.
“What this company has been about
since the beginning has been inspired by
Moravian baking, ” says company President
Brooke Smith. “They were bom out of a
time when spices were revered.”
Today, Salem Baking Company
preserves this tradition. In the same town,
using the same recipe, the company
produces Moravian cookies all year.
The cookies come from a modem plant,
located on a busy highway, filled with
massive machines, but every one tastes like
something simple and familiar.
Leah Hughes is an associate editor at
Our State magazine.
Her Take
on Tradition
\
Alison Turner
works with cookies
all day. Her job
sounds simple,
but if s difficult
to improve upon
a centuries-old
recipe that
everyone in
North Carolina
loves. Turner is
— the research and
_
. i 40 development chef
at Salem Baking Company. She works
with Vincent Pellegrino, the vice president
of research and development and a Salem
Baking employee for about 15 years, to
take old-timey favorites and pair them
with new flavors. Thanks to Turner and
her team, classic Moravian cookies now
come enrobed in chocolate or infused with
lemon zest. The key is to never get too far¬
fetched, Turner says. When searching for
new tastes, she never forgets the classics.
О
Fifteen cookies at a time ride down the conveyor as they transition from ingredients to dough to cookies in © flavors from ginger
to chocolate to shortbread. The cookies then leave the Salem Baking plant in
О
familiar tube-shaped packages.
200 Our State December 2012