When the Dutch founded New York in the seventeenth century, one of the customs they brought with them from Holland was that of the doed-koek. Literally meaning dead-cake, a doed-koek was a funeral biscuit, marked with the initials of the person in the coffin and given to each pallbearer. The custom is likely related to “sin-eating,” the practice of hiring someone to symbolically consume the sins of a person who had recently died: first, the family of the deceased placed a morsel of bread and a piece of cheese on the chest of the corpse; then, the designated sin-eater entered the room, picked up the food, and ate it while standing before the body. Rather than thank the sin-eater for thus purging their dearly departed, the family of the deceased then concluded the ritual by hustling him out of the house and into the street, cursing him and throwing stones. No doubt this bum’s rush out the door was a vestige of the custom described in the Old Testament of chasing a goat, supposedly laden with the sins of the community out of the village and into the wilderness. This execrated animal was known as the scapegoat.