āYou canāt talk when your mouth is full of powdered sugar,ā Rose Levy Beranbaum tells me over the phone. Weāre discussing Mexican wedding cakesāalso known as Russian tea cakes, Swedish tea cakes, pecan butterballs, pecan sandies, polvorĆ³nes, and plenty of other namesābecause Iām trying to figure out where in the hell these delightful powdered-sugar-dusted holiday cookies originated.
Levy Beranbaum, a cookie expert and author of nearly a dozen baking cookbooks, is relating a story about momentarily debilitating a local newscaster who took a bite from one of her Mexican wedding cakes. āHe couldnāt talk! And the powdered sugar went all over his pants and suit,ā she laughs. āThe cookies are explosive and thatās part of whatās so wonderful about them.ā
I fully agree, and Iād go as far as saying that eating a Mexican wedding cake is something of a masochistic experience: Youāre bound to end up with powdered-sugar-dusted clothes and lips, and if you try to talkāor, god forbid, laughāwhile eating one, be prepared for more. Mexican wedding cakes are light and elegant, yet also messy and somewhat dangerous to consume during polite conversation.
Quite homely in appearance, they require little skill to bake and only a handful of common ingredients. (So little skill, in fact, that they were the first cookie I ever learned to make, thereby lodging them deep into the nostalgia center of my brain.) Theyāre always small, hand-formed, coated in powdered sugar, and containing ground nuts of some kindāoften pecans, sometimes walnuts or almonds. Theyāre my buttery, crumbly Proustian madeleine, and the only cookie I make without question year after year for Christmas.
But if thereās one thing I canāt shake about them, itās their completely nebulous family tree.
My mom tells me that our family recipe came by way of her sister, who was introduced to them at a party in the early 1970s, where they went by the name Swedish tea cookies. Sheās not sure exactly how they became known on her handwritten recipe card as āMexican Wedding Cakes/Russian Tea Cakes.ā
Indeed, thereās a sort of collective amnesia about these cookies, as though they appeared out of nowhere yet seemingly hail from everywhere. Many sources Iāve consulted suggest that they were once largely known as Russian tea cakes, but that a surge in popularity in Tex-Mex cuisine led to them being rechristened as āMexicanā in the United States.
I emailed Darra Goldstein, a food scholar and expert on the history of Russian cuisine, to see whether she could shed any light on why the cookies might be known as Russianāand it turns out thereās scant evidence that Russians ever ate them. āIāve quickly looked through some more old Russian cookbooks and none of them contain recipes that perfectly match what we know as Russian Tea Cakes/Mexican Wedding Cakes,ā she said. āThere are plenty of small cookies with nuts (usually almonds), butter, sugar, and flour, but they always contain eggs.ā
Levy Beranbaum connects Mexican wedding cakes to kourambiethes or kourambiedes, buttery Greek cookies that look a lot like a Mexican wedding cakes, but usually contain egg yolks and a flavoring agent such as brandy or orange juice. That would open up an entirely different potential lineage, since kourambiethes are related to a popular Arab cookie known variously as qurabiya or ghraybeh (or many other transliterations, depending on your Arabic dialect), whichāfollow me hereāis most likely the descendant of an ancient Arab cookie known as khushkananaj gharib. (Gharib means āpeculiarā or āstrangeā in Arabic, a possible indication of their uniqueness. Thereās also kurabiye, a Turkish catchall term for various types of shortbread biscuit, which almost certainly shares etymological roots with ghraybeh.)
After talking with Levy Beranbaum, I consulted Ibn Sayyar al-Warraqās 10th-century chronicle of Baghdadi cuisine, Kitab al-Tabikh, which contains a recipe for khushkananaj gharib. The cookiesāmade with flour, sugar, and sesame oilādonāt contain nuts, but they are molded into little domes before being baked. Al-Warraq also includes a variation on the cookie, shaped into a crescent, which does contain ground almonds and more closely approximates contemporary ghraybeh cookies.
Whether Greek or Persian or Arab or Ottoman, the cookies are usually served with teaāthus the denomination of ātea cake,ā perhaps? And the Middle East is certainly closer to Russia than it is to Mexico.
But the Russian part still doesnāt square away. Goldstein speculated that the name arose during the 1920s in the U.S., when massive waves of so-called white Ć©migrĆ©s fled their homeland in the wake of the 1917 Revolution. āRussia became associated with elegance and sophistication hereāthink of Russian ballet and caviar and the Russian Tea Room in NYC,ā Goldstein said. āThereās a similar phenomenon with so-called Russian tea in the Southāit has little to do with the way tea is drunk in Russia, but the name stuck.ā
Some sources Iāve encountered claim that the term Mexican wedding cake did not appear in American cookbooks at all until the 1950s, and that it displaced the more popular Russian tea cake because of national antipathy toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Goldstein thinks thatās unlikely. āChicken Kiev and beef Stroganoff were both enormously popular in the 1950s and ā60s, under their actual names,ā she told me. āSo I donāt think Cold War tensions played out in the culinary realm.ā
In fact, well before the start of the Cold War, and before the Soviet Union even entered World War II, American cooks were baking Mexican wedding cakes. In a 1937 edition of the journal American Cookery, a reader wrote in with the following request: āI would appreciate so much if you could send me a recipe for āMexican Wedding Cakes.ā They are small, round tea cakes, rather short, filled with nuts, and rolled in powdered sugar.ā
So if theyāre not Russian, are they actually Mexican? Some sources suggest that the cookies were brought to North America by Spanish conquistadors, who knew them as polvorĆ³nes. (PolvorĆ³n means āpowderā in Spanish, which fits the bill, certainly.) Flatter in appearance and usually larger than Mexican wedding cakes, polvorĆ³nes were allegedly created sometime in the 16th century in Andalusia, but they remain popular all around Spain during the holidays now.
PolvorĆ³nes almost always call for almondsāalthough pecans, being native to the Americas, would have been a fitting substitute for the Spanish colonizers. They also belong to a shortbread cookie family called mantecados, which use lard in place of butter. Some sources suggest thatās evidence that polvorĆ³nes could not have come to Spain by way of the Moors, who might have known a cookie like ghraybehāprobably known as ghoriba, as itās called in Morocco and elsewhere in the Maghrebābut they would have not consumed pork products. (Of course, considering the North African and Middle Eastern influence on Spanish food and culture, it would make sense if khushkananaj gharib or its many descendants made their way to the Iberian peninsula, with ingredients adapted to local tastes along the way.) In any case, the Mexican wedding cake trail once again goes cold.
At the end of all of this, I feel no closer to discovering the concrete roots of these beloved cookiesāand perhaps none of this really matters to todayās baker. But if thereās one takeaway from this Mr. Toadās Wild Ride of history Iāve gone on, itās a simple tip from Levy Beranbaum. To create lighter Mexican wedding cakes and kourambiethes, she suggests using clarified butter, which has been chilled and then beaten with sugar for 10 minutes before itās incorporated into the dough. (Ghee would work well too.) Itās a technique that was suggested to her by protĆ©gĆ© David Shamah. āHis family is from Syria,ā she says, and he explained to her that some Middle Eastern cookies āare made with clarified butter for a melt-in-your-mouth texture.ā (Hello, ghraybeh!) Because clarified butter has little to no water content, cookies made with it will be less prone to developing gluten, leading to a crumblier and lighter biscuit.
Thereās one other takeaway thatās clear too: No matter the name, thereās an undeniable universal appeal to this kind of cookie, especially around the holidays. Sweet, buttery, and always threatening to explode with sugarāwhatās not to love?
Editor's note: This article has been edited to remove an insensitive reference.
