December 21, 2016
Homemade cookies and pastries were staples of my childhood. Trays of cookies showed up for holidays, celebrations, weddings, funerals, and, sometimes, for no apparent reason.
My mother along with relatives and friends set up a cookie-making operation that went on every night for weeks leading up to my sister’s wedding. The overseer was Annie Castagnola, a family friend. She had a thin spiral-bound 3-inch-by-5-inch notebook of cookie recipes. The notebook was the kind we used in grade school to write down our homework assignments. Annie’s recipes were a curated collection gathered from a host of “old Italian women,” my grandmother included.
The little notebook was coveted by more than a few cooks. Annie, however, did not share her recipes, even when those recipes came from relatives of the very people who were asking for them. I know, my mother was one of those people who wanted some of her mother’s recipes. Annie wouldn’t budge. The situation got resolved, however, during the cookie-baking marathon for my sister’s wedding. One night, Annie left her little notebook at our house overnight. Nobody’s confessing, but there are a few cookie recipes in my mother’s recipe box (sitting on my bookcase) written in my twelve-year-old hand.
Annie died a while back. Her little notebook is most likely gone forever and along with it the baking secrets of a whole group of “old Italian women.”
Of all the cookies that showed up throughout the year, my favorites were the various kinds of cakey cookies, my mom’s Genets, Aunt Margie’s aptly named “Colored Cookies,” and my cousin Angie Catanese’s Sesame Seed Cookies, to name a few. These cakey cookies, which were not very sweet by American standards, were usually little balls but not always. Genets are lemon flavored knots. Colored Cookies are vanilla flavored balls, each made with four or five pinches of dough of different colors rolled together. Sesame cookies are little logs, perfect for dunking into some Vin Santo. For me, though, the best of these cakey cookies are Totos, little chocolate spice balls.
| Prep Time | 45 minutes |
| Cook Time | 2 hours |
| Servings |
dozen cookies
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- 4 tablespoons unsalted butter
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla or lemon extract
- 1/2 pound powdered sugar
- 2 1/2 tablespoons whole milk approximately
Ingredients
Icing
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- In a small saucepan, melt the lard over low heat. When just melted, remove the lard from the heat and allow to cool slightly.
- Meanwhile, combine the flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cloves, cinnamon, allspice, and nutmeg together. Reserve.
- Make the icing and reserve.
- Put the sugar into a large mixing bowl. Add the cooled but still liquid lard and mix well until thoroughly combined. The mixture will be gritty. I recommend doing this by hand with a mixing spoon but you could use a portable electric mixer.
- Add the eggs one at a time to the sugar and lard mixture, mixing well after each addition. The sugar should dissolve as the eggs are added.
- Add the milk, honey, vanilla extract and lemon extract to the egg mixture. Mix until well combined.
- Add the reserved dry ingredients. At this point there really is no better option than to reach into the mixture with your hand and get everything well combined. The dough will be somewhat sticky. Be certain that all the dry bits are scraped off the bottom and sides of the bowl and combined into the dough.
- Roll the dough into walnut-sized balls. If you want to weigh the first few to get the size correct, they should be between 21 and 22 grams.
- Space the cookies several inches apart on ungreased cookie sheets. Bake at 375°F for 8-10 minutes until the cookies are very slightly browned on the bottom but still soft when touched. They have a tendency to crack as they bake. This is normal. You can bake two trays at a time, one in the lower third of the oven and one in the upper third. Be sure to switch the top and bottom cookie sheets after five minutes and also turn them front to back.
- As soon as you remove the cookies from the oven, carefully put them on cooling racks.
- Ice them immediately by holding a cookie with one hand and using the tip of your finger to spread a dollop of icing on the top half of each cookie. The icing should be a glaze, not a thick coating. Put the iced cookies on cooling racks to cool completely.
- Well wrapped, the cookies can be refrigerated for several weeks or frozen for several months.
- Melt the butter. Add the sugar, vanilla (or lemon) extract and 2 tablespoons of milk. Mix well. Add more milk, a teaspoon at a time, if needed, to make a thick icing that will hold its shape and spread well.
- It may be necessary to add a bit of milk from time to time if the icing stiffens up over the course of icing each batch of cookies as they come out of the oven.
Check out my method for rendering lard.
I prefer to grind my own spices using a small electric coffee grinder, except for the nutmeg, of course, for which I use a small grater. It is best to pass the ground spices through a small strainer to get out any small bits. If you don’t grind your own spices be sure to buy really fresh ground ones so the flavor is vibrant.
This recipe doesn’t involve any strenuous beating so the first few steps can easily be completed by hand with a sturdy mixing spoon rather than with a mixer. Similarly, after adding the dry ingredients, the dough only needs to be mixed enough to come together. This is easily (and traditionally) done with your hand though I suppose a dough hook would work, too.
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