A baking comparable to the Linzer Torte has already been found in ancient Egypt and cakes with ingredients similar to the Linzer Torte were already made in the Roman Empire. For a long time, almond cakes were one of the luxury foods that only the nobility could afford.
The oldest recipe for the Linzer Torte comes from the 17th century. In 1619 a „Mandl Dortten“ was served for the first time. Countess Anna Margarita Sagramosa’s cookbook from 1653 contains four recipes with the term “Linz” in the title. The first printed cookbook with a recipe for the Linzer Torte is the baroque “New Saltzburg Cook Book” from 1718 by Conrad Hagger, the royal Saltzburg “court, city and landscape cook”.
The „Good and sweet Lintzer Taig“ consists of butter, almonds, flour, sugar, eggs, lemon peel and „The plaited Lintzer Dorte“ is decorated with a grid, a surface covering parquet, through the free areas of which the red jam shines. Due to the lattice decoration, the underlying volume appears as small, narrow diamonds, equilateral parallelograms, squares with four sides of equal length. A rhombus is also known as diamonds, one of the four colors in the French card game.
The characteristic diamonds pattern of the Linzer Torte symbolically represents an ideogram, a stylized image that can stand for the progressively crisscrossing passage of the moon. Rue is a plant whose name comes from the Latin word „rūta“. Even the Middle High German word „rūte“ is transferred to the radiant, symmetrical four-part flower shape of the rue. It is used as a stylistic element in coats of arms, the design of which is based on simple geometric structures. On a diamonds shield, which is used in French and English heraldry for unmarried and widowed women, the diamonds is on top. Such a diamonds shield is called a ladies shield.