Levy Beranbaum connects Mexican wedding cakes to kourambiethes or kourambiedes, buttery Greek cookies that look a lot like a Mexican wedding cakes, but usually contain egg yolks and a flavoring agent such as brandy or orange juice. “There are plenty of small cookies with nuts (usually almonds), butter, sugar, and flour, but they always contain eggs.” “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. 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. Many sources I’ve consulted suggest that they were once largely known as Russian tea cakes, but that a surge in popularity in Tex-Mex cuisine led to them being rechristened as “Mexican” in the United States. Indeed, there’s a sort of collective amnesia about these cookies, as though they appeared out of nowhere yet seemingly hail from everywhere. She’s not sure exactly how they became known on her handwritten recipe card as “Mexican Wedding Cakes/Russian Tea Cakes.”

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.

Madeline cookie etymology