This is rather sensual information, so the woman who supplied it shall remain nameless. She is, after all, a 40-year-old professional person with two children. Her reputation should be considered.
Besides, the way one eats an Oreo is such a personal thing.
”First, I break it open and lick all the filling off the one wafer,”
she reveals. ”Then I begin nibbling around the edges of the wafer until it is all gone. Finally, I put the other wafer on my tongue and just let it sit there in my mouth until it dissolves.”
Everyone has his or her own way of eating an Oreo. That`s part of the mystique of the planet`s most popular cookie–a small, circular chocolate biscuit sandwich with an imitation vanilla filling that Nabisco cranks out at the rate of 6 billion a year.
Given the popularity of a 73-year-old product more American than apple pie, it was perhaps inevitable that the free-enterprise system should find even more ways for us to eat an Oreo.
CRUSHED, CRUMBLED, FROZEN
And it has in recent times. The modest little Oreo has been made the star ingredient of a plethora of new products, many of them so terminally trendy that the Cookie of the People must be downright embarrassed.
Dairies across the country are now putting crushed Oreo bits in their ice cream. Many upscale ice cream emporiums offer crumbled Oreos mixed into ice cream or as toppings.
Popsicle Industries not only sells its Oreo-bits ice cream in containers but uses the cookie inside chocolate-covered ice cream bars and in ice cream sandwiches made with oversize Oreo wafers.
Candymakers are getting into the act by dipping Oreos in chocolate.
(Schafer`s Candies sells chocolate-coated Oreo cookie bits in its five Philadelphia stores for $3.59 a pound. At the Kron Chocolatier shop on the groovy Upper West Side of Manhattan, a box of 12 coated cookies will cost you $8.50).
While these new uses certainly qualify as creative, the top innovation award should go to a restaurant-bar in Sarasota, Fla., that has come up with what is believed to be the world`s first Oreo cocktail. The drink consists of vodka, creme de cacao, ice cream and an Oreo cookie.
But so much for these Oreo-come-latelys. They are but passing confections. Nothing will ever supplant the essential act of eating a solitary, undisguised Oreo according to the dictates of one`s own creative core.
RIGHT UP THERE WITH KEDS
The Oreo is, after all, the quintessential cookie. It was pronounced such by no less authorities than Betty Cornfeld and Owen Edwards, the authors of
”Quintessence: The Quality of Having It,” a recent coffee-table tome that deals with such ultimate products as the Zippo lighter, Ivory soap, the El Bubble bubblegum cigar and the Goodyear blimp.
”The quintessentiality of the Oreo is mysteriously and precariously balanced,” Cornfeld and Edwards write in their Oreo essay, which is found on the page opposite Keds high-top sneakers. ”Witness the failure of the spinoff Oreo Double Stuf, the `Jaws II` of cookies, in which the white cream is laid on twice as thickly as it ought to be; a classic case of fixing something that isn`t broken.
”The real Oreo, having twice the biscuit as icing, brilliantly fulfills a fundamental requirement of the quintessential cookie: It absolutely demands to be eaten with milk.”
The Cornfeld-Edwards testimonial brings a predictable response from Mel Grayson, Nabisco`s vice president for corporate affairs: ”Our reaction to nice things said about us is a nice reaction: We approve.”
He does not, however, approve of the authors` contention that Oreo Double Stuf is a flop. ”It generates nowhere near the volume of the original, but it is still a very popular item,” he says.
OVER 200 BILLION SOLD
After all, he reasons, what else but the real thing could produce that kind of volume? There have been 200 billion Oreos made since they began dipping into the nation`s milk supply in 1912, he proudly notes.
Two hundred billion is, of course, a number of such dimension that it defies comprehension. Happily, vice president Grayson comes to the rescue:
”If you were to stack all the Oreos made since 1912 on top of each other . . .”
(Oh, come on, readers. You didn`t expect to get through a story like this without one of these stupid comparisons, did you?)
”. . . they would reach to the moon and back four times.”
Although it is certainly the biggest-selling cookie, the Oreo is not the oldest ”creme”-filled chocolate cookie sandwich. It`s archrival, Sunshine`s Hydrox cookie, is one year older.
”Hydrox is the original creme-filled cookie,” said Marge Cavagnaro, a spokeswoman for Sunshine Biscuits. ”Oreo copied us.”
Unfortunately, however, originality and similarity to an Oreo hasn`t quite cut the biscuit. Hydrox may be Sunshine`s best-selling cookie, but it is still a distant second to the Oreo. As such, you could kind of think of Hydrox as the Avis of the chocolate sandwich cookie industry. Right, Marge?
”Well, not in our opinion,” she replied icingly. —
