“The cookies are explosive and that’s part of what’s so wonderful about them.”
“You can’t talk when your mouth is full of powdered sugar,” Rose Levy Beranbaum tells me over the phone. We’re discussing Mexican wedding cakes—also known as Russian tea cakes, Swedish tea cakes, pecan butterballs, pecan sandies, polvorónes, and plenty of other names—because I’m trying to figure out where in the hell these delightful powdered-sugar-dusted holiday cookies originated.
I fully agree, and I’d go as far as saying that eating a Mexican wedding cake is something of a masochistic experience: You’re bound to end up with powdered-sugar-dusted clothes and lips, and if you try to talk—or, god forbid, laugh—while eating one, be prepared to choke and cough and heave white powdery clouds like some kind of wholesome Tony Montana. Mexican wedding cakes are light and elegant, yet also messy and somewhat dangerous to consume during polite conversation.
My mom tells me that our family recipe came by way of her sister, who was introduced to them at a party in the early 1970s, where they went by the name Swedish tea cookies. She’s not sure exactly how they became known on her handwritten recipe card as “Mexican Wedding Cakes/Russian Tea Cakes.” I emailed Darra Goldstein, a food scholar and expert on the history of Russian cuisine, to see whether she could shed any light on why the cookies might be known as Russian—and it turns out there’s scant evidence that Russians ever ate them. “I’ve quickly looked through some more old Russian cookbooks and none of them contain recipes that perfectly match what we know as Russian Tea Cakes/Mexican Wedding Cakes,” she said.
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