A Tiny Christmas Cookie Mystery – Solved
My search for truth and almond cookies
My “to bake” list morphs into pure fantasy in the days before Christmas. As if pulled from Clara’s Land of the Sweets, I imagine I’ll produce Swedish princess cakes for research, refine my rainbow cookies and master the art of panettone. I stay up late googling recipes and picture myself buying little paper boxes, which I’ll tie up in candy cane butcher strings and deliver to friends and family.
For years, I was caught in a cycle of believing in my fiction. Perhaps time would become taffy-like and my secret abilities to construct, say, stollen would unfurl from my flour-covered hands. The reality is more modest: a couple dozen cookies rolled out between Christmas and New Year’s.
My desire to overbake and my faith in my ability to produce a glut of professional-level desserts is inherited. When I was growing up, my Nana’s Christmas Eve table was crowded with the cookies she made in the week before December 24th. Her sweet contributions included butter cutouts, gingerbread people, Italian white cookies, soft ginger cookies, chocolate crinkles, oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, butterballs, anise toasts, coconut date balls and almond slices. She would also bake and distribute cranberry nut breads and fruit cakes. All this in addition to hosting extended family for the Feast of the Seven Fishes.
Nana is now 99 and was recently admitted to hospice; she hasn’t baked in years.
Yet something about preserving her bakes (in memory, not always in practice) gives them vitality. I can pass the recipes along, change them to fit my tastes or ponder why one person needs two separate recipes for chocolate crinkles. Or, in the case of Nana’s almond slices, go on a quest to solve a tiny culinary mystery.
I tried to write out the names of cookies as Nana, a first-generation Italian-American, would say them aloud. She often called foods by a descriptive English word (“pasta with white clam sauce,” for example) rather than using Italian, which she spoke at home with her family. As soon as I began to study Italian, Nana’s usage of the phrase “almond slices” stuck out to me. Everyone else in our orbit called them “biscotti,” which means twice-baked. They had all the appearance of biscotti–slim ovals with nuts nearly the same shape. While they took some teeth to bite into, they didn’t have the same crunch as a traditional biscotti. And when Nana taught me how to make her most-loved cookie, I realized she only baked them once.
They were not biscotti. So what were they? And why didn’t I ask when I had the chance?
I spent large chunks of my childhood at Nana’s kitchen table, listening to her tell stories as she seasoned sauces and allowed me to test pasta. I’ve always considered myself close with Nana, yet there are still questions I never asked. Why did you marry my grandfather? Who taught you how to cook? If you believed education to be so important, why didn’t you read books? Something about these fundamental questions seemed too intimate to bring up with Nana. When she spoke, it was my job to listen, not to inquire.
Perhaps I could sense, even as a child, that the stories she didn’t tell me were left unsaid for a reason. The mother who died when she was a toddler, the father people spoke of only in whispers, the intelligence pushed aside for a life of service to the men and boys around her.
But the recipes. Those she would share if you asked, which is how I learned how to bake almond slices before I knew what they were really called.
I recently reread the prologue to Louise DeSalvo’s Crazy in the Kitchen, DeSalvo’s memoir about her Italian-American family. It opens with a passage called “Wild Things,” which recounts how her grandparents spoke of the dangers of the Southern Italy they left behind. DeSalvo writes, “There were men wild with rage at their wives or sisters who disgraced them, who dragged their women into the piazzas of villages to beat them so that all would see they were men who could keep them in line, my grandmother said.” DeSalvo believes the violence of the land and the people is fiction until she learns otherwise as an adult.
I have no idea how much our families’ stories overlap, but DeSalvo’s words reminded me that Nana’s omissions might have been for self-preservation. In some ways, I appreciate that my Nana only told me the sanitized version of her life, tales of outrunning the boys in foot races and being praised by her various bosses for her work ethic. It gives hope to her American Dream that poverty and violence could be left behind.
However, I wish there had been a point in our relationship where she allowed me to crossover into adulthood, where she shared more about her origins. All I learned about her mother was our physical resemblance. “It’s like you chopped her head off,” my Nana used to tell me. Maybe she had a feeling I already knew the family history, that it all existed in some shared skull.
This tension led me on an ancestry.com quest to learn what I could about my family’s history. To see their names and faces, to find out where they were born and to catch glimpses of their handwriting on various government forms. I discovered that all of my paternal great- grandparents emigrated from Puglia, small towns along the Achilles tendon of Italy. My research quickly shifted from maps to cookbooks, searching for recipes that had stayed true across an ocean and a century.
In the pages of Rosetta Costantino’s insightful Southern Italian Desserts, I learned about quaresimali, the proper name for Nana’s almond slices. Despite time and distance, the recipes are nearly identical. Costantino notes that these cookies are derived from the Italian word for Lent (Quaresima) and are abundant in Southern Italy. Their lack of added fat makes them appropriate for Lent, a season of deprivation. Almond slices were never a mystery; it was only a matter of translation.
It seems fitting that my grandmother would become known in her circle for a cookie that symbolizes sacrifice. It was often a theme of the stories she shared and a big part of her self-mythology: all she gave up to help her family. The way she worked endlessly in the run-up to big holidays to provide a feast for those around her.
I yearn to chop away the guilt and pass along the joy–hundreds of cookies sitting in silver wrappers and cousins loudly singing Christmas carols. But to show only the sugar work is a facade. I want to preserve the traditions while injecting more honesty into the mix. The recipes are just the beginning.
Related Thoughts
My in-laws recently traveled to Puglia and brought home a cookbook for me. Of course, quaresimali were featured. I’m looking forward to playing around with different variations.
Sometimes, a cookie is just a cookie, and there’s no better celebration of the art than the New York Times’ Cookie Week. I can’t wait to make Melissa Clark’s Gingerbread Blondies and Sohla El-Waylly’s Rainbow Rave Cookies (anyone else have a toddler who would flip for these?). However, I’m not putting pressure on myself to bake these by a specific deadline. NYT links are gifted, friends!
If you’re a Cookie Week fan, I highly recommend Kerry Diamond’s interview with recipe developer Samantha Seneviratne for Radio Cherry Bombe. They give a behind-the-scenes look at the process of making the sugary section come to life.
For posterity, I’d like to add that our Christmas dessert table also included many classics presented to my Nana as gifts. Those included pizzelles, cannoli, cheesecake, Ritz cracker toffee, Baci chocolates, torrone and something the family called “navels” (delicate fried bow ties of pastry served with powdered sugar or honey and nuts). Costantino says these are often served at Carnevale in Calabria and go by several names, including Chiaccheiere and frappe. Everyone left with a full tin.