Mexican Wedding Cookies vs Russian Tea Cakes vs Snowballs

One cookie, a lot of names

Wikipedia's entry lists Russian tea cake, Mexican wedding cake or cookie, snowball and butterball as names for the same pastry: flour, butter and ground nuts, rolled in powdered sugar while hot and again once cool. Food Republic adds pecan sandies to the pile and admits nobody is sure where most of the names came from.

Snowball is the easy one: it looks like a snowball. Polvorón is almost as easy. Mexico News Daily traces it to the Spanish polvo, dust, for the crumbly texture and the sugar coat. Russian is the mystery, and Wikipedia says plainly that the reason for it is unknown.

The shared ancestor: qurabiya

Culinary historians trace the family to qurabiya (also ghraybeh), a shortbread first documented in 10th-century Arabic cookbooks, made with ground almonds. Mexico News Daily tells the same story: the cookie spread from medieval Arab kitchens along trade routes into Europe and on to Spain.

Greece got its version by way of the Ottomans. Writing for Culinary Backstreets, Carolina Doriti says kourabiedes take their name from the Turkish kurabiye, from kuru (dry) and biye (biscuit), and are thought to have come from Tabriz in Iran. In Greece they share the Christmas table with honey-soaked melomakarona.

From Spain to Mexico

Spain's polvorones and mantecados are Andalusian Christmas sweets made with pork lard. Spain's official food promotion site gives the protected Polvorones de Estepa recipe as 40 to 50 percent wheat flour, 20 to 25 percent lard and 22 to 27 percent powdered sugar, with cinnamon and at least 8 percent almonds. The same site says the earliest recorded recipe is a 1740 manuscript from Morón de la Frontera, near Seville.

Spanish colonists brought the cookie to Mexico in the 16th century, and there pecans often stood in for almonds. Mexico News Daily says polvorones became a wedding and Christmas cookie because they stand for happiness and unity. Our Mexican polvorones follow Pati Jinich: pecans, butter plus shortening for crumble, and two coats of sugar.

Did the Cold War rename them?

The story goes that American cookbooks of the 1950s swapped Russian for Mexican to dodge Cold War feeling. Mexico News Daily repeats it, without a source, and it is everywhere online. It is disputed, and we could not find a food historian who documents it.

The problem is timing. Mexico News Daily also says the first known American mention of the cookie as Mexican came in a 1937 issue of American Cookery, a reader asking for a recipe for Mexican wedding cakes. What does seem right is that the Mexican name spread through US cookbooks in the 1950s. Both names are still in use.

What actually differs

Mostly the nut and the fat. Mexico News Daily says Mexican wedding cookies use more flour, so they come out sandier and more buttery, often with vanilla and sometimes cinnamon or anise, while Russian tea cakes lean on finely ground walnuts and are denser. Spanish polvorones use lard and almonds, and Greek kourabiedes are typically made with almonds too.

Treat these as kitchen habits, not rules, because recipes cross over all the time. If you like this kind of short, sandy dough, our Scottish shortbread and Danish vanilla wreaths sit next to it in our cookies of the world collection.

Questions people ask