The Black-and-White Cookie's Curious History

by Robert Sietsema for New York Eater

No pastry — except perhaps the cheesecake — is more closely associated with New York City than the black-and-white cookie. This flattened dome of fine-textured cake, with a coating of chocolate and vanilla fondant bisected in the middle to keep the flavors apart, is really not a cookie, but a "drop cake," as William Grimes points out in a 1998 New York Times article. Many believe it was descended from a cookie popular for over a century in upstate New York called the "half moon." This baked good has a cookie-shaped base of chocolate cake (vanilla is a common variation) with a fluffy layer of actual frosting on top, with the same chocolate and vanilla demarcation as the black and white, but with a thicker layer of chocolate frosting. Wikipedia and other suspect sources contend it was invented in Utica by Hemstrought's Bakery early in the 20th century, but the archaic form of the cookie and the iconography suggest the half moon is much older.

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