Black-and-White Cookies

Tuesday, 25 February 1997

I think my favorite thing about black and white cookies is the name. "Black and white cookie." So simple, so lacking in any historical or commercial qualities. If they'd been invented centuries ago in Europe, they'd probably be named after a city, or some otherwise-forgotten noble. If they'd been invented within the past few years, they'd have been given a trendy, zippy tag, of no more than four syllables, probably ending in "--oes" or "--ies." Well, "cookies" already ends in "--ies," but that's not what I mean.

I've just checked with a snack-food savvy co-worker from North Carolina who has never heard of black and white cookies, so it's possible that they're a New York thing. Just in case, here's a description for you folks in the provinces: Imagine a disk-shaped cookie about the size of your hand. The top is covered with frosting, one half black, the other white, evenly divided down the middle. Around here, they're well-known enough that the classic Star Trek episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" is known as "the black-and-white-cookie episode."

Anyway, I suppose that if they had been invented in the nineties, they might have been called something simple and unpretentious, just because a lot of companies are trying to cultivate the image of being simple and non-corporate now. But "black and white cookie" is just too much of a non-brand. The manufacturer's lawyers would question whether they could even trademark a name like that, and that would be the end of it.

But the black and white cookie was invented in the long-lost days before branding was considered more important than product. It's a non-proprietary cookie standard, like "chocolate chip." There are any number of cookie manufacturers who make them (I spotted three different brands as I was walking to the deli cash register this afternoon with some soda and a bag of Doritos, which is what inspired today's Natter.)