Scrap Pictures

Appears in

The Christmas Cook: Three Centuries of American Yuletide Sweets

Published 1990

About

The impulse to decorate was not extinguished by the industrialization of Christmas cookery. Artistic expression merely found other modes of outlet. If the tin cutter allowed the Christmas cook to re-create repetitiously the identical trotting horse, the identical jumping hare, the identical heart, year after year, the scrap picture liberated the surface decoration of each cookie with infinite color and variety.

Scrap pictures, which take their name from the fact that they are small scraps or pieces of paper, probably trace their origin to the medieval practice of printing religious pictures of saints or protective devices directly on edible wafers with ink and wood blocks. These wafers, usually made at monasteries or places of religious pilgrimage, were sold or rewarded to the faithful who came for a particular cure or blessing, much in the same manner as the small Andachtsbilder (devotional pictures) that were printed on paper. The pictorial wafers were intended to be eaten in order to ingest (and therefore benefit from) the blessing. The Andachtsbilder were taken home and tucked away in a safe place with other religious artifacts. Sometimes Andachtsbilder were used as scraps on Christmas cookies, as in the case of the Madonna and Child on the opposite page. This picture was printed at Einsiedeln in Switzerland and widely distributed in the United States among the German immigrant community during the 1860s.¹⁵