The Black-and-White Cookie

The Black-and-White Cookie: Decoding The New York Dessert

The thing about the black- and-white cookie, Elaine, is you want to get some black and some white in each bite. Nothing mixes better than vanilla and chocolate. And yet somehow racial harmony eludes us. If people would only look to the cookie all our problems would be solved -- Jerry Seinfeld (The Dinner Party)

Every now and then, Jesus pops up in a dairy product: A choir woman from Georgia saw Jesus in an entrée from pizza hut. Another found him— circa Magdalene years— in the spill of her hot chocolate milk. The entire family Toledo was saved by a pierogi.

Stock up on Beeno; the lactose intolerant are doomed.

It’s not surprising that people look for larger meaning in their viand. To a certain degree, food is the most immediate way that we that reveal to the people around us our intimate desires and tastes. So it’s only natural to expect that the foods that we choose to eat will tell us something revelatory, if not necessarily of theological force.

This qualification couldn’t be truer than in New York City, where the closest most get to a religious experience is filling out a profile on J Date.

Consider New York’s most iconic treat: the black-and-white cookie. An oversized, cakey disk painted dark chocolate on one half and lemony white on the other, it seems almost intended as an exercise in analysis.

And even those who don’t appreciate the great Dan Brown’s code-cracking escapades soften a bit when it comes to our caloric mascot. We want to believe that there’s a larger meaning in our dear confection.

The black-and-white is a New Yorker’s edible Rorschach: It’s the symbol of racial harmony; the representation of class divide; the Western answer to the Taoist’s yin/yang; work and play; morning and night; SSRI and JetBlue decaf.

Those of us who would turn to the cookie’s history in an attempt to fully understand its symbolism, however, will encounter the dark side of pastry’s past.

Though bodegas and diners across the New York will identify the cookie as a staple, one that even my Brooklyn-born grandfather can remember eating after Dodgers games, no solid research can identify its inception or the trajectory of its proliferation.

Rather, the history of the black-and-white seems as elusive as the identity of original Ray of Original Ray’s Pizza.

A discussion with a vendor at New York’s wondrous all culinary bookshop Kitchen Arts and Letters confirms both the ubiquity of the search and paucity of information regarding the beloved cookie:

“It’s like asking who invented toast. In the days when it was first being promulgated, no one thought to say ‘here comes this important cookie.’”

Even the omniscient wikipedia is uncharacteristically taciturn here! Cash in your bar mitzvah savings bonds; the end is nigh.

Yet, the cookie’s unknowability is perhaps its lure. Like most children raised in the New York area, I remember voraciously eating black-and-white cookies— breaking the heart in two, debating which side to eat first, which bite to offer my brother.

And as with the best sensory memories, I’m forever searching out an experience that might approximate its greatness. Where is the black-and-white of yore? How come my childhood bedroom looks so small in pictures?

A few years ago, I vowed to try every black-and-white that crossed my path. I would not, I promised, discriminate against mass produced, supermarket brands or those cookies marketed by celebrity chefs, even the ones whose cooking is more cleavage than cleaver.

Rather, I would try every bifurcated cookie that I could in the hopes of encountering one that— like all the boyfriends I’ve had since Seth in Kindergarten— would meet the impossible standards corrupted by nostalgia.

Months of numerous dead ends hardly merit specific mention. And, I’ve no desire to try to remember what aught be forgotten. In short, the crimes that I encountered in the name of the bi-colored cookie seem to fall into either of two categories— the first related to the topping, the second to the base.

The worst of the toppings just plain got it wrong: Gloppy, butter cream frosting! Unctuous ganache! A rock hard shell of nothing but tempered and cooled chocolate!

The ideal icing for a black-and-white should be soft, yet stable. It should form a protective shell about and eighth of an inch in thickness over the cookie mound. It must maintain a very specific relationship to the cookie beneath: Like the existence of 24-hour delivery in the life of a New Yorker— the topping must always be present, yet we must be able to conceive of life without it.

To describe what constitutes the cookie portion of the black-and-white is almost to set it up for failure. The base of the black-and-white cookie is not actually a cookie at all. It should be made of cake batter, thickened a bit to hold its shape on a sheet pan.

The cake must be moist, but not greasy. It should have the kind of subtly sweet, pillowey crumb that you get from a properly-baked muffin. The bottom (which is actually the top during baking) aught arc into a graceful mound that sets into its meditative frosting.

In my quest, the first contender that finally came close on these fronts was from a kosher-style deli uptown, whose proprietor seemed oddly paranoid about any praise I lavished on the cookie. Even the faintest gesture on my part to compliment its maker was met with the fury of a thousand low-carb dieters.

Thankfully, I found another black-and-white that not only equaled, but surpassed the one that I’d tasted at the deli. The black-and-white cookie at Greenberg’s Bakery on the Upper East Side has set the new standard.

The icing is divided into two regions. By itself, each of these two parts offers a singularly full taste sensation that could stand on its own. Yet both of them together meld into a remarkably complex dessert.

The white side has an utterly fresh and slightly acidic, lemony taste. The dark side possesses the richness in feel and flavor of a deep espresso.

Eaten in a single bite, the two sides recreate in one experience the entire sensation of eating milk and cookies. We move back and forth between an acerbic lightening and luxuriant deepening of our taste buds. Sustaining this experience is the lightly sweetened, golden canvas of “cookie”, which Greenberg seems all but to have invented.

This is the cookie of my youth—not, of course, the one that I actually used to eat (which I’m sure was a prepackaged, saccharine mess), but the one that I like to remember to have eaten.

This is my black-and-white cookie. It’s a cookie that insists on recreating its own ideal and, in doing so, in recasting its own history. Its mercurial symbol is nothing more than whatever perfection we can find in it today. The black-and-white cookie points to nothing but whatever is the current paradigm of its best self, as if to answer its own question: I don’t represent some idea of New York, I am New York.