Once the commemorative Moon Landing Oreos hit the markets, John King Tarpinian not only took a photo of a package in his local Target store (published here last week), he bought it and gifted it to me when we met for lunch a few days later.
They tasted lovely. The lavender-colored marshmallow filling not only differs in color from standard Oreos (which is white), the texture is slightly more of a gel than normal. (I can imagine orbiting astronauts squeezing it from a tube.) Despite the color, the flavor wasn’t floral or exotic — if not quite the same as usual, the filling didn’t taste very different. The result was a much more pleasing Oreo cookie than the peanut-candy-flavored experiment they temporarily marketed not long ago, which I also tried.
Those of a certain age, like I am, grew up watching TV commercials that demonstrated the infinite techniques for eating Oreos, of which the most important is unscrewing the cookie and eating the filling first.
But fans overthrew this indoctrination at the 1987 Worldcon in England when the Chicago in ’91 Worldcon bidders ran a party with a milk-and-cookies theme. As reported in File 770 #70:
[At the Chicago in ’91 party] those who stayed were fascinated by the Oreos; they kept asking about “the black cookies” and how to eat them. Straight-faced Chicagoans told them you must carefully unscrew the Oreo, eat the white filling, and throw the black cookies away. So they did. Others were coached to methodically time the dunking of their Oreos in milk. Two of the most enthusiastic Oreo-eaters were “the happy Slav brothers,” one fan term for the Yugoslavian Worldcon bidders, whom [Ross Pavlac] claimed decided not to run against Chicago in ’91 because they liked the Oreo party.
Like Chicago radio personality Paul Harvey used to say: “And now you know…the rest of the story.”
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There’s a near infinite variation on Oreo cookies as the food pantry I staff on Sundays gets them from time to time from Shaw’s, one of the food chains in the Northeast. I’ve seen Pumpkin Spice, cookies ‘n’ cream, Key Lime Pie, S’Mores, Cinnamon Bun, Hot Chili and Salted Caramel. The latter was quite good. The hot chilli was amazingly popular.
I take these (or indeed any cookies with filling) apart, eat one of the hard sides, then stack the fillings together on one cookie, eventually reaching several fillings. Then I put a hard cookie back on the stack, and slowly squeeze the filling together, licking off the excess as it’s pushed out of the side.
I really should stop doing this and go back to trying to lose weight…
(The rest of … the rest of the story re: Oreos at WorldCon ’87)
I was one of the three people (Vicki Bone and Roberta Jordan were the other two) all Chicon ’91 committee volunteers, who smuggled approximately 20 lbs of Oreo cookies (several packages) into England for the party. The committee was unable to find a convenient source of Oreos in England (from what I remember, the packages were small and expensive) so it was decided to bring them from the US.
As we passed through customs at Heathrow, we were asked if we had anything to declare and we all said we didn’t, so we were passed straight through.
NPR had a story about a class where the instructor used Oreos as an example. The students were very international, so many were baffled. So, during lunch, the instructor went out and bought a number of packages. The class spent an hour or so experimenting with different techniques. Some students refused to try them – they found the concept disgusting. Very cultural responses.