Dead Cakes Funeral Customs

This passage comes from pages 338 to 339 of Curiosities of Popular Customs and of Rites, Ceremonies, Observances, and Miscellaneous Antiquities by William S. Walsh (1925).

Doed-Koecks. (Dutch, meaning literally "dead-cakes.") A sort of cookies served in old New York to the attendants at funerals. Alice Morse Earle, in "Colonial Days in Old New York," cites an old receipt for their manufacture: "Fourteen pounds of flour, six pounds of sugar, five pounds of butter, one quart of water, two teaspoonfuls of pearlash, two teaspoonfuls of salt, one ounce of caraway seed. Cut in thick slices four inches in diameter." Sometimes the cakes were marked with the initials of the deceased. Friends and acquaintances frequently carried them home to retain them for years as mementos of the occasion. In Albany, a well known bakery made a specialty of these cakes; but they were frequently of domestic manufacture. Families of extra good breeding sometimes sent a couple of the cakes, with a bottle of wine and a pair of gloves, as a summons to the funeral.

Burial cakes were not unknown in England, and, indeed, they are still baked in Lincolnshire and Cumberland, to be served at funerals. So late as 1748 they are advertised by a Philadelphia baker.