A lot depends on what is "recent", products added in the last month, last week, last day, last 10 minutes,
Anyway, this question has been asked a million times (well, almost). There are several threads and mods that allow you to have a page that looks like a category page but only has "recent" products. Unfortunately, I haven't found one that works properly for 4.4.x versions of x-cart. X-cart really needs to make this a module.
There is a thread at
http://forum.x-cart.com/showthread.php?t=57790 that discusses the latest incarnation of this, and there are probably 3rd party mods that do the same thing as well.
That said, what you are specifically asking about should be pretty simple. You need to search the database for all products with a "add_date" that is newer than "whatever is least recent" (called for in seconds) and output a list of urls to those products. The thread mentioned above should give you some clues on this.