I was accosted by a huge sale bin of these attractively packaged cookie bars on the way in to the grocery store the other day. I was feeling a bit under the weather – so a comfort food impulse purchase seemed entirely within bounds – and they ended up in the bag with some jarred hot and sour soup and frozen garlic bread. I mustered the restraint necessary to wait until dessert before opening them.

While not tasting exactly like chocolate chip cookies, they do, to my recollection, share a flavour profile with a favourite lost cookie from my childhood: Nabisco Hoo-Rays. They’re missing the caramel, but the preponderance of toasted coconut, chocolate and biscuit paint as complete a picture as I need for a cookie that I haven’t eaten in over 25 years. Yes, I looked that up.

I’ve researched these guys in the past, but came up pretty much empty-handed. Finally though, it seems the information has caught up with my need to know. Hoo-Rays were rectangular and came in a paper bag, and they were quite similar to Chew-Chews, which were  ring-shaped and lived in a cello-tray affair. A forum query a while back got a response suggesting a similarity to Girl Scout S’Mores, which made no sense to me until I discovered today the existence of the Girl Scout Samoa Cookie.

Now I’ve never seen a Girl Scout hawking a Samoa Cookie before, and it may be a regional thing; up here you get two flavours of fairly run-of-the-mill sandwich cookies, which you buy from co-workers almost entirely out of charity. Maybe they have some kind of minty offering too – I’ve been out of the office environment for a while and no one has come do my door with cookies in hand. If you have a Girl Scout troop around here, tell your girls to step it up.

So there you have it; not exactly Proust, but more information that wants to be free. Suggested pairing with Girl Scout Samoa Cookies: Sauternes. Also, in somewhat obvious revelations, NAtional BIScuit COmpany = NABISCO. Dur.