Fig Newton
Didn’t know it was a trademark, did you? But only the cookies made by Nabisco are, legally speaking, Fig Newtons. Everything else is just “fig bars.”
One popular theory says that Fig Newtons were named after Isaac Newton, but much as we’d all like to see a line of famous scientist cookies (maybe Copernicus Nut Clusters or Heisenberg Uncertainty Macaroons), no such luck. It turns out that the first Fig Newtons were baked by the Kennedy Biscuit Company of Massachusetts, back in 1891. The folks at Kennedy Biscuit, later merged into what would become Nabisco, evidently had a habit of naming their confections after local towns (Beacon Hill, Shrewsbury, etc.) and institutions (e.g., Harvard). The Fig Newton thus immortalizes the lovely Boston suburb of Newton, Massachusetts.
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What about Choco-Leibniz cookies? You know, those wonderful little chocolate-covered biscuits: http://gdcom.stores.yahoo.net/bahchocleibd.html
Are you saying that they weren’t named after mathematician and philosopher (and a bunch of other things as well) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz? They are not the best of all possible cookies?
Cousin Wiki says that they are actually names after him, because they come from Hanover, where he was born (weak connection, but hey, still better than the Newtons)… anyway, even if that’s incorrect, I still like thinking of them as the only cookies named after a scientist/philosopher. It makes eating them feel much more sophisticated.