Is the Black and White Cookie From New York City or Utica?

The Manhattan claim: Glaser's, 1902

Glaser's Bake Shop opened in 1902 in Yorkville, then known as Germantown, as a mostly bread bakery run by German immigrants John and Justine Glaser. Wikipedia says the black and white is commonly traced there and that it was among the shop's original recipes. That 1902 date is when the bakery opened, not a dated first cookie.

The family was modest about it. When Glaser's closed on July 1, 2018, after 116 years, ABC7 New York reported that co-owner Herb Glaser would not claim ownership of the cookie. Lines wrapped the block on the last weekend anyway.

The Utica claim: Hemstrought's half-moon

Upstate, the cookie is a half-moon, and Hemstrought's Bakery in Utica is its best-known home. Spectrum News marked the bakery's 100th year in 2020, when its chairman described the company's job as making the original halfmoon. The bakery dates its recipe to 1920 on Genesee Street, while Wikipedia, citing a Syracuse University Press book, says half-moons there probably started around 1925.

The name itself is older than the bakery. Etymologist Barry Popik found ads for half moon cookies in a Watertown, New York, paper in 1912 and in Syracuse in 1920. A price ad cannot tell you what those cookies looked like, so the most anyone can say is that upstate bakers were selling something called a half moon by the 1910s.

What is actually different

They are cousins, not twins. Wikipedia describes the New York black and white as flat, with fondant or a firm icing over a dense cake base, and the half-moon as slightly domed, on a fluffier cake. Popik notes the Utica half-moon is usually a chocolate cake with dark fudge frosting on one side and white frosting on the other.

Our New York black and white cookies follow King Arthur Baking: a soft, cakelike base with a hint of lemon and two glossy icings. King Arthur calls them a corner-deli regular, which puts them in the same New York case as our New York cheesecake.

What Seinfeld did and did not do

In The Dinner Party, which aired February 3, 1994, Jerry eats a black and white in a bakery line and turns it into a metaphor for racial harmony. It is one of the best-known cookie scenes on television.

It is pop culture, not history. The episode tells you the cookie was already a New York bakery staple by the 1990s, which nobody disputes. It settles nothing about Glaser's or Utica, and you can find the black and white beside other classics in our cookies of the world collection.

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