December 15, 2018

Nostalgia cookie of the day: Devil's Food Squares.

Look at this great commercial:



That was the one cookie we always had at my house when I was a child — because these were the cookies my father liked. There were other cookies — Hydrox, Oreo, Vanilla Wafers, Pecan Sandies, Scooter Pies — but the king of all cookies was the Devil's Food Square.

And I love the outdoor ethos of the commercial. These were clearly boys' cookies. Boys and grizzly bears' cookies.

And I have to give this my "logos" tag for that Nabisco logo (which turns into a cowboy on a horse and gallops off).

38 comments:

rcocean said...

Chip Ahoys were our favorites.

Seeing Red said...

It was my favorite cookie. It still is but I’m reduced to Snackwells.

Ann Althouse said...

"Chip Ahoys were our favorites."

2 reasons these aren't on my list:

1. They don't exist until 1963.

2. The main cookie we baked from scratch was chocolate chip — the "Toll House" recipe on the bag the chips were sold in, and these were so much better than any packaged chocolate chip that I would never favor a packaged chocolate chip cookie.

I have eaten them because in later years my brother liked them, so we had them, and I bought them for my children, but that was a good choice because they wouldn't tempt me at all.

Ann Althouse said...

"It was my favorite cookie. It still is but I’m reduced to Snackwells."

As a commenter at the video says: "These are not the same as Snackwells. Snackwells suck and these were good. They were my favorite cookie when I was a kid. This is a really early commercial with clear packaging. The packaging I remember with orange and yellow, I think. I really miss these, I've tried to find them, but they aren't made anymore under a different brand or anything."

rcocean said...

"The main cookie we baked from scratch was chocolate chip"

Yep. The homemade ones are much better. But our mother only baked oatmeal cookies.

Seeing Red said...

I loved eating the corners first.

Ralph L said...

Before my time I guess.
I miss Brown Edge Wafers, but they priced them too high. Same with Lorna Dunes, which are still available on the top shelf at My Harris-Teeter.

Ralph L said...

Last time I bought some, they'd changed Pecan Sandies to reduce the crumbs--and totally ruined them.

The Keebler Simply Made choc-chip cookies are pretty good for store-bought.

reader said...

I remember eating these but at the time they were called Devils Food Cakes by Nabisco. If you type in devils food cookie in duckduckgo Althouse comes up as the third search result.

BarrySanders20 said...

Vienna Fingers were the most common for us in the 70s. Mom must have liked them.

Love the way the cowboy camper uses the grip of his revolver to hammer in the tent stakes. Best practices for gun safety.

Ann Althouse said...

"Yep. The homemade ones are much better. But our mother only baked oatmeal cookies."

You had an evil mother!

Didn't she teach you that you can bake your own cookies!

wendybar said...

I never saw that kind of cookie in my life. Just by seeing them, I know I would have loved them.

Jimmy said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ann Althouse said...

"Just by seeing them, I know I would have loved them."

The chocolate coating was like thin, crunchy icing, and the marshmallow layer was quite thin. This wasn't a particularly sweet cookie. But it was dark chocolate with just that little line of white between the cake and the icing. The idea must have been to express the idea of devil's food cake in the form of a cookie.

It was very different from, say, a Mallomar, which was a big favorite with children and had a softer chocolate coating over a big gob of marshmallow on a vanilla cookie base and which was much sweeter and fluffier.

Darrell said...

Cookies have to be crunchy.
DFSs aren't.
Some people don't agree, but they'd be wrong.

Ralph L said...

My brother's MIL baked about 8 different cookies every Christmas until she was ~90 (now 96). She'd leave the pecans out of half the choc-chips because my brother didn't like them. He has the world's best MIL.

Robert Cook said...

I always preferred the original Hydrox to Oreos. Then, they changed Hydrox to taste more like Oreo, and ruined it!

Robert Cook said...

I did like Devil's Food Cakes, (as I knew them).

Darrell said...

I always preferred the original Hydrox to Oreos.

Weirdo.

Ann Althouse said...

"I always preferred the original Hydrox to Oreos"

Me too.

Hydrox were the originals, copied by Oreo. Oreos were softer, with thicker, smushier cream. Oreos were the children's version of the more high-class Hydrox.

Tank said...

Those were great cookies, definitely a favorite.

Danno said...

The devil's food cookies were my fav and still are. I usually find a brand besides Nabisco.

Ralph L said...

I think I had the round version once. It would have been much better if lighter or thinner. But it might have been a Snackwell, so two strikes against it from the get-go.

gilbar said...

there's an important lesson in that commercial!
IF you let the bears have a supply a pic-a-nic baskets, with Goodies; they Won't Kill You

The whole murderous bears at Yellowstone thing started when the Dept of Int decided, in their infinite stupidity to STOP people feeding the bears; result: Angry Bears!

combine that with the stupid courts preventing the US Forest Service dealing with bears their way (SHOOTING them), and you got a LOT of Angry bears

RichardJohnson said...

Perhaps because my mother (unlike Hillary Clinton) baked cookies- and later on my sister and I also baked cookies- I don't remember those commercially made cookies. One kid-oriented ad I remember was an ad for Good and Plenty candy. I didn't particularly like Good and Plenty's licorice taste, so I didn't eat them very much. Like Narraganset Beer, which had Nichols and May do 'Gansett commercials, Good and Plenty ads were better than the product. And that Good and Plenty commercial wasn't all that good.

Danno said...

The house brand at Walmart has been discontinued. I recall that these were made more like the original devil's food cookie. The Snackwells seemed to be a result of the attempt to make a really low-fat cookie. The equivalent of chocola-fied cardboard.

It appears Mendelez (a Kraft break-up company) sold the Snackwells business several years ago to a another company, so maybe that is why there are no longer private label brands out there.

Wince said...

Nostalgia cookie of the day: Devil's Food Squares... these were the cookies my father liked.

"When you take the Devil into your mouth... you're DOOMED!"

"Tell him to shut up and let's get it over with."

Darrell said...

Taste and smell are closely linked, so people with anosmia also are unable to properly taste food.

That's why I rely on Althouse for all my food reviews.

Tyrone Slothrop said...

Darn right grizzly bears love Devil's Food Squares. Keep them far away from your tent in an air tight container, preferably in a designated bearproof locker. If no such locker is available, keep them in your vehicle's trunk. Remember that if the bear can smell your Devil's Food Squares, he is perfectly capable of destroying your car to get them.

tcrosse said...

For my sins I worked for many years at a company that made refrigerated rolls of cookie dough. A marketing guy told me that they figured that about 40% of the stuff never saw the inside of an oven.

rcocean said...

"Taste and smell are closely linked, so people with anosmia also are unable to properly taste food."

But she can remember how the food smelled/tasted BEFORE she lost her sense of smell. Limbaugh has the same thing with his hearing. His hearing aid can't process songs very well, but if he'd heard the song BEFORE he went deaf, his brain supplies the melody, and hears it perfectly.

Darrell said...

The faintest stink is stronger than the strongest memory.
Wait--that's ink.

wildswan said...

My mother baked and we loved her cookies, eating them right out of the oven before they finished baking, if she left the kitchen unwatched. But there was another food category, namely, exotic cookies from the store. Twinkies, Mallomar, Oreos-loaded with sugar, crammed with bad goodness, and featuring a deliciously strange stale stiffness in the thick icing. An excellent preparation for the adult food you got over at the White Castle after you were twelve and had an allowance - 12 cents a hamburger, "Buy 'em by the Bag." My mother speeded up the car as we passed the place and we said nothing, having learned that this was just another thing adults knew nothing about.

gilbar said...

Tyrone Slothrop said...
Darn right grizzly bears love Devil's Food Squares. Keep them far away from your tent in an air tight container, preferably in a designated bearproof locker. If no such locker is available, keep them in your vehicle's trunk. Remember that if the bear can smell your Devil's Food Squares, he is perfectly capable of destroying your car to get them.

they tell us Now, to 'make sure you change cloths, and don't bring the clothes you ate in (particularlly Devil's food squares!) into the tent. And as Tyrone said, a bear can smash out your window (and then rip off the door) without any real effort

But, you know what bears don't do that sort of thing? Full, contented bears, with their bellies already full of pic-a-nic baskets full of goodies

Craig Howard said...

Didn't she teach you that you can bake your own cookies!

I was a boy! She didn't teach me to bake at all.

I eventually learned a little, though -- from friends and roommates.

That was the seventies version of adulting classes.

Michael said...

Why are so many people talking about chocolate chip and pecan sandies and everything else besides the Devils Food Squares or Devils Food Cakes? The article is not about those others and frankly I don't give a care what your alternate favorite cookie was. I loved the Nabisco product, I tolerated the Snackwells replacement until the last version. the latest counterfeit version really sucks. Tastes nothing like the original and has a totally different texture.

Nansea said...

"And I love the outdoor ethos of the commercial. These were clearly boys' cookies."

Hahahahaha that's a silly thing to say! Your "outdoor ethos" applies to girls as well as boys lol. These were not "boys' cookies." They were my favorites too.

And Snackwells definitely were not the same!

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