Cookie Recipe Urban Legend

The "Neiman-Marcus Cookie Recipe" story is a hoax.

The story this lesson is based on is what is called an Urban Legend. An urban legend is a myth, or folktale, set in the modern world. Like older myths, urban legends are engaging, generally believable stories that have some kind of moral. For example, even though there is no such thing as a "Neiman-Marcus Cafe" in Dallas, the bill did not include a charge for the dessert cookies (only the two salads), and it is unlikely that Neiman Marcus carries a $20 scarf, the very good recipe and the little details of the first-person narrative make it sound authentic. The story seems plausible because of our mistrust of large corporations, and the moral of the cookie story is, of course, to always check your credit card slip for unusual charges before signing it.

The story itself is interesting in that it is only the latest (and, thanks to the Internet, most common) version of this story. The people who study Urban Legends say this story evolved from one concerning a recipe for Mrs. Field's Cookies, and that the cookie story is itself a variant of one concering a red velvet cake recipe from the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City that is more then 50 years old. You can review all of these from the Urban Legends Archive index for this group of stories.

Some other web references include:

• Neiman Marcus comments on the story, including a free cookie recipe (different from this one) that is probably offered as a joke.

• The same recipe given in this story, contain in a 1985 version of this Urban Legend attributing the recipe to Mrs. Fields Cookies.

• Story about the history of this "urban myth", including text of an article from the Los Angeles Times (and a mirror copy of this same web page).

Those links are only a fraction of what is available on the web concerning this story. A Search with Google (or any other search engine) will turn up hundreds, if not thousands, of web pages with something about this story. For example, the seach string "neiman marcus cookie recipe story" gave over 1600 matches.

One person attributes our susceptibility to Urban Legends to the Gullibility Virus in a fake newspaper story that is, itself, an Urban Legend.

Submitted by J. A. Carr