Posted by Ed Levine, January 15, 2008 at 6:45 AM
Many current and former New York City residents swear by a local specialty: the black and white cookie, an oversize cakey, almost spongecakelike cookie iced with a shiny, half-vanilla, half-chocolate fondant frosting. There was even a famous Seinfeld episode, "The Dinner Party," in which Jerry held up a black and white cookie as a symbol of racial harmony and peace among men and women (George and Elaine, to be precise).
But what a lot of folks don't know is that, according to most culinary historians and even Wikipedia, black and white cookies probably originated in central New York (where they're called half-moons) at a Utica bakery, Hemstrought's. In 1999 Saveur magazine tracked down Hemstrought's half-moon cookie recipe. And just to confuse matters further, in Germany there is a black and white–like cookie called an Amerikaner.
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Posted by Ed Levine, October 15, 2005 at 2:19 PM
So how were the desserts? Well, it was hard to judge the banana coconut cream pie from the Little Pie Company because my wife managed to flip the pie upside down as she carried it into our host's house. So it instantly became a banana coconut cream pudding with pieces of crust dispersed throughout. But it was really good pudding. The chocolate ganache cake from Soutine was impossible to cut cleanly, but the external bittersweet chocolate glaze was excellent if a little thick, the chocolate ganache inside was obscenely rich, and the cake was surprisingly dry and crumbly. The real surprise of the three was the coconut cake from Greenberg's coconut cake. The icing was coconut-flavored whipped cream (yum!) and the cake was light and moist. I had thought Greenberg's had gone precipitously downhill ever since the founding Greenberg family sold the business ten (?) years ago, but this was a damn fine cake.
I bought all three desserts as research for my next big New York Times piece, which is going to be on neighborhood bakeries.
Many current and former New York City residents swear by a local specialty: the black and white cookie, an oversize cakey, almost spongecakelike cookie iced with a shiny, half-vanilla, half-chocolate fondant frosting. There was even a famous Seinfeld episode, "The Dinner Party," in which Jerry held up a black and white cookie as a symbol of racial harmony and peace among men and women (George and Elaine, to be precise). 
