what is a hermit anyway?
Oh you never would believe where those hermit cookies come from… They’re made mostly by New Englanders these days. That is, the people of Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine…New Hampshire, and, oh…come on now…uh…Rhode Island! That’s it. As a flatlander, I always had trouble with those little states on grade school geography tests. Things clearly aren’t much better now. Where hermits came from originally is anybody’s guess. The trouble with cookie recipes is that people really didn’t start writing them down in earnest until the 1800’s. As with most culinary mysteries, people speculate wildly, and misinformation abounds. Some cookie historians claim hermits were so-named because their brown color resembled the sack-cloth clothes of a hermit living in the hills. Next! Others cite the cookie’s ability to keep well for weeks in a tin…very hermit-like. No way. The most convincing story I’ve heard attributes the Hermit’s origin to the Moravians, who were sometimes referred
