The Infamous Neiman-Marcus Cookie, and how N-M sorta asked for it

For many years—since sometime in the 1980s—one of my pet net.rants has been about the mythical Neiman-Marcus $250 cookie recipe.  It used to be that I couldn’t go two weeks without seeing it go past on Usenet or Fidonet somewhere, posted by yet another clueless netizen who was all too willing to spread scurrilous slanders and hearsay.  Just about every regular on the newsgroups had seen that post way too many times and knew the story was slanderous, so posting the recipe was a good way to get flamed into oblivion, and many net.newbies got their first experience of mass net.hatred that way.

And with reason, because the story is a fake.  A shuck.  A phony.  You could even call it . . . a lie.    I contributed my share of flames whenever I saw the recipe posted yet again; I get bent WAY out of shape when I see irresponsible gossip being spread so.  I have a long article that appeared in the Los Angeles Times around 1991, debunking the story thoroughly, and I’d post and email it back to the original author, with a scolding note about believing wild tales.  The same yarn, with slightly different details, was told about the Waldorf Astoria hotel and their Red Velvet cake as early as the 1940s.  The story wasn’t true then, it ain’t true now, and it ain’t ever gonna be true.

But still . . . in a way, I can see Neiman’s as a target of “what goes around, comes around.”  And for why?  Because in 1997 I was at a book show and bought a cookbook called A Taste of Texas, compiled by Marihelen McDuff, edited by Jane Trahey, and published by Random House in 1949.  On the cover, the blurb says:  “At long last!  The Neiman-Marcus cook book!  With more than 300 tested, mouth-watering recipes . . . .” etc. etc.  (Remember they said “The Neiman-Marcus cook book.”  That phrase gets to be important later on.)

“These very special recipes were culled from some 2,000 sent in by our N-M customers.  Many of them Texans born, Texans bred, or Texans by proximity, Texans by adoption, Texans by osmosis or capillary attraction.”  On page 236, the following story appears:

A Kansas City schoolteacher visiting in New York dined at a chichi hotel and for dessert had a piece of delicious chocolate cake.  After going home, she wrote the chef asking for the recipe and adding that she would pay anything for it.  The chef sent the recipe and a bill for $100.00.

“The school marm promptly lost her appetite and consulted an attorney who advised her she had made a legal contract.  When she sent the chef her check, she added bitterly that she was going to scatter the recipe to the four corners of the earth.  [The contributor] and this cook book are just helping to scatter it.”

Now doesn’t that sound awful familiar?  Sure . . . I knew you’d think so.  It’s nothing but the Red Velvet cake tall tale, with the Waldorf edited out to avoid a lawsuit for defamation and a different cake recipe attached.  But it’s still the same mean-spirited rumor-mongering that had Neiman’s as its target in the 1980s and ’90s.  They got back what they started, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold.

Edit:  Oh, yeah.  And the recipe makes REALLY sucky cookies.

Jack Paar intuited the magenta sting ray in the cornfield.  Fnord.