On the way home from basketball practice, my son, the high school freshman, was dragged by his mother to the supermarket.
Which is how the latest iteration of the sprawling Oreo franchise ended up on our kitchen counter.
It was a new, limited-time product called “The Most Stuf Oreo.” The package promised cookies with the regular sort of cardboard chocolate wafers bracketing massive globs of sugar-and-vegetable-oil paste. My son eyed them greedily.
When the National Biscuit Company introduced the “Oreo Biscuit” in 1912 (in a shameless imitation of the Hydrox cookie that had established itself years earlier as the “King of Biscuits”), it was a simple affair: “two chocolate-flavored wafers with a rich, creamy filling.” The original ratio? About 2 parts wafer to 1 part filling.
By the ’20s, the name had changed to the Oreo Sandwich Cookie. Genius! There is something essentially American about a “sandwich cookie.” P.J. O’Rourke once observed that just as “the Vietnamese will turn anything into a soup … Americans will turn anything into a sandwich.” Even cookies.
Just as sandwiches come in endless variations, so too Oreos. You can get them with vanilla rather than chocolate wafers, pie-crust wafers, or chocolate-chip cookies. There are even more varieties when it comes to the filling: mint, peppermint, chocolate, peanut butter, berry, lemon, limeade, candy corn, cherry cola, strawberries and cream, and no doubt many more. (I have yet to see Oreos with asparagus wafers and brussel sprout filling, but can they be far behind?)
A good sandwich is a study in proportions. The Brits struggle with sandwich construction because they tend to skimp on the middle section of the equation. I have had pub sandwiches that consist of two triangles of limp white bread interrupted by a single slice of antiquated cheese.
The American tendency (if we’re being honest: the American fault) runs the other direction. Dagwoods that we are, we celebrate the overstuffed. Is it any surprise the great sandwich cookie has become just as bloated as the typical American sandwich?
Nabisco started monkeying with the essential filling-to-wafer ratio (an equation cookie scientists render as F:W) with the introduction in the 1970s of the Double Stuf Oreo. Some sticklers have complained — and I wonder whether they have yet sued — the Double Stuf doesn’t fully deliver on its promise of twice the filling. But there’s no doubting that the cookie has a higher F:W ratio than the original.
For those craving even more sugar goop than that in the Double Stuf, a few decades later came the Mega Stuf Oreo. Yet, even that was not enough. And so, my son now had in his hand the Most Stuf Oreo. He popped it in his mouth and chewed away.
His expression went from delight to a sort of quizzical disdain.
“It’s … ” he began, then chewed and thought some more. “It’s imbalanced.” For that savvy judgment, he should have won a cookie, but all we had were the Most Stuf sort, no prize at all really.
My son had hit on a key concept essential to good food and drink: balance. The salad dressing may be delicious, but drenching the lettuce with twice as much of it doesn’t make a better salad. A little salt draws out the savor in a steak; that doesn’t recommend a heavy hand with the Morton’s.
So too with mixed drinks: Balance has been at the heart of the cocktail renaissance. The best bartenders look to find the right ratios of sweet to sour, strong to weak.
Aristotle and Goldilocks were on to the same thing.
And yet, the cookie boffins at Nabisco, who should know better, continue to throw their F:W ratios out of whack. Where will it end? Today’s enormity is the Most Stuf. Can it be long before Oreo rolls out the Double Most Stuf?
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
