S'mores Period BOrigin theory CVerified

A s'more is nothing more than a bar of chocolate and a toasted marshmallow pressed between two graham crackers, a campfire sweet rooted in American camping culture. None of its parts are unusual. Chocolate had been sold in industrial bars since the nineteenth century, and marshmallows were being mass-produced by the same period; graham crackers, too, were long since on American shelves by the early twentieth century.

Yet with the ingredients on hand, the s'more is still not there. It appears only in a scene out of doors: gathered around a fire, a marshmallow on a stick is toasted until it turns pale gold and softens, then pressed while hot between chocolate and crackers. As Girl Scout and other camping cultures spread, this became a sweet that children could easily make outside, and the whole ritual settled into place along with it. The name itself is a shortening of "some more"—the request called out around the fire, which seems to have passed straight into the name of the dish.

The s'more, then, is best seen not as one person's invention but as a sweet that arose within American camping culture, was passed along by word of mouth, and was eventually set down in print.

The s'more has a long-repeated origin story. A Girl Scout leader named Loretta Scott Crew is said to have devised it, and the first recipe is said to have appeared in a 1927 handbook, Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts. With an inventor's name and a publication year both so specific, the tale has circulated as if it were plain fact.

But try to check it and the story falls apart twice over. The first problem is the inventor. Shannon Browning-Mullis, a historian at Girl Scouts of the USA, says no record of a person named Crew can be found anywhere, and called her "as imaginary as Rat and Mole," the animals of a children's story. Nor is the 1927 book a record of any one person's achievement. Its title page says it was compiled and published by Girl Scouts, Inc.; it names no individual as the creator of the recipe, and Crew's name is nowhere to be found in it.

The book does, however, contain the recipe. On pages 71 and 72 is an item titled "Some More": sixteen graham crackers, eight bars of plain chocolate broken in two, and sixteen marshmallows. Two marshmallows are toasted over the coals "to a crisp gooey state" and put inside a graham cracker and chocolate bar sandwich. The entry ends with a joke: "Though it tastes like 'some more' one is really enough."

The second problem is the claim that 1927 came first. According to reporting by National Geographic and others, there is an earlier record from 1925: a recipe published that May by Dorothy "Cookie" Moore, a British-born Girl Guide leader, in the magazine The Girl Scout Leader. It is said to have used graham crackers, Hershey's chocolate and marshmallows, toasted until the marshmallow turned pale gold and soft. That same year, the sweet is reported to surface in quite different sources as well: at a conference in Buffalo, New York, it was introduced as a "Somemore"; a Rochester newspaper ran a recipe under the headline "Yummie Dessert"; and in Kalamazoo, Michigan, "summore" was added to a Scout menu. If the reports hold, a magazine and several local papers—separate kinds of record—all point to 1925, two years before the handbook.

The history of the word does not clash with this. The 1927 handbook still spells the title as two words, "Some More." According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the spelling "s'more" appears in print in 1934. The plural "s'mores" comes later still: the Online Etymology Dictionary dates it to 1937. The dish reached print first; the shortened name settled into writing only afterward. The true origin of the s'more lies not in a single hero but in the habits of a group gathered around a fire.