Despite the popularity of most Italian foods, there is a serious gap when it comes to Italy's colourful and diverse repertoire of cookies.
While the vast array of Italian olive oils, breads, pastas, cheeses, etc., are celebrated in fancy restaurants and mainstream supermarkets, the Italian cookie remains an anomaly.
Besides biscotti for dipping in a latte, and perhaps those crispy wafers called pizzelle, the Italian cookie carousel remains familiar mostly to Italian-Americans who bake or folk fortunate to live a short walk from an Italian bakery.
Most North Americans, asked to define cucidati, will furrow their brows and perhaps blush. (It's a fig cookie. And, for the record: koo-chee-DAH-tee.) Ditto for the chubby Italian lemon cookies. Sicilian sesame cookies. Cantucci (crunchy almond cookies).
There are more. Hundreds more.
"The range of Italian cookies in Italy are virtually unknown here," said Francine Segan, an Italian-American and author of Dolci: Italy's Sweets (Stewart, Tabori & Chang). Her book explores many Italian cookies, including amaretti and savoiardi (a.k.a. the ladyfingers you enjoy in tiramisu), and she acknowledged that she only skimmed the surface in her beautiful book. Indeed, the variety she found on her travels through Italy, she said, was "a real surprise."
Part of the problem is that these cookies' flavour profiles are often lost on a culture that reaches for a soft-sweet-sugar blitz.
"Americans generally like chewy cookies," Segan said. "To get a soft, chewy cookie, you're going to need a lot of butter. Generally, Italians don't like that much." And, she added, "they do not [use] as much sugar as we do."
Which brings to mind a friend who dislikes Italian cookies just for those reasons and describes them as tasting "industrial." It's true they are rarely gooey, often cakey and pair beautifully with coffee, which is how Italians like them. Rarely are they the prettiest kids on the cookie tray. But once you adapt to the sturdy, honest flavour, you'll become addicted. What's more, they keep forever - it's not unusual for a recipe to end with, "Store in an airtight container for up to a month." And they'll come out of the freezer just fine after a year. "It's essentially," Segan concluded, "a cultural difference."
This still doesn't explain why the multifaceted language of Italian cookies remains so limited, because there are, after all, some that are gooey (the aforementioned cucidati) and soft (cavallucci, made with honey, nuts and anise).
Segan thinks it has to do with the role of the cookie in its homeland. She travelled throughout Italy for her book, exploring the cuisine's language of dessert.
Italy's bakeries usually focus on bread, she said, while its chefs tend to concentrate on fanciful desserts. Cookies, she learned, are very much a homemaker's domain, and obviously travellers are not going to experience these cookies, short of knocking on a few doors and inviting themselves in.
Emily Luchetti, a San Francisco-based pastry chef (Farallan and Water-bar) and cookbook author (Classic Stars Desserts, A Passion for Desserts), sees that focus translate to Italian-American bakeries, which produce fabulous breads and other baked goods. Cookies? Not so much.
Luchetti wonders if it's time for North American bakers to start bridging the gap between Italian classics and American preferences.
The pine nut-fig cookie in her latest book, The Fearless Baker: 175 Surprisingly Simple and Utterly Indulgent Recipes (Little, Brown), uses traditional Italian ingredients (pine nuts, figs, semolina) but incorporates melted butter to create a moister, flatter cookie.
"The good thing about Italian cookies, as opposed to [oversized] American cookies, is that sometimes you just want a small bite of something sweet," Luchetti said. "The tradition of the Italian cookie is in a good spot: It has stayed where the intention was."
SICILIAN SESAME COOKIES
Prep: 40 minutes Chill:
1 hour Cook: 30 minutes
Makes: 24 cookies
From Dolci: Italy's Sweets, by Francine Segan. This variation of the Sicilian classic produces moist, lemony cookies, encased in a crunchy sesame-seed crust, writes Segan, and "is a bullet-proof recipe that produces pastry shop-perfect cookies every time."
2 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
8 Tbsp butter, olive oil or lard, see note
3 eggs, separated
2 Tbsp milk
1 Tbsp honey Grated zest of 1/2 lemon
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup sesame seeds
3 Tbsp water
Combine the flour, sugar and butter in a large bowl until mixture resembles coarse sand. Add the egg yolks, milk, honey, lemon zest and salt; knead with your hands until a dough forms. Roll the dough into a ball; cover with plastic wrap. Refrigerate 1 hour.
Heat oven to 350 F. Toast the sesame seeds in a dry skillet over medium heat until light golden, about 5 minutes; shake pan occasionally and do not overcook, or they'll burn. Pour into a shallow bowl or plate; let cool.
Beat the egg whites and water with a fork in a small bowl; set aside.
Divide chilled dough into four portions. Roll each section into a log about 1 inch thick; cut the log into 1 1 /2-inch sections. Dip each section in the egg whites, then roll in the sesame seeds, covering all sides.
Place cookies on baking sheet lined with parchment or foil. Bake until golden, about 30 minutes. (Do not over bake; check the bottom of the cookies.) Cool cookies on wire rack. Cookies can be stored in an airtight container for several weeks, and freeze well too.
Butter or oil give these cookies a softer centre; lard makes them crunchier.
PINE NUT AND FIG COOKIES
Prep: 40 minutes
Cook: 12 minutes per batch
Makes: About 30 cookies
These cookies could be considered the bridge between Italian and American tastes that pastry chef Emily Luchetti mentions.
Traditional Italian ingredients - pine nuts, figs and cornmeal - meld with an American approach (courtesy of the chewy goodness from generous amounts of butter and brown sugar).
This recipe is adapted from Luchetti's book, The Fearless Baker.
1/2 cup pine nuts
1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted
1 1/2 cups firmly packed light brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 large egg plus 1 large egg yolk
2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup white cornmeal
1/2 tsp each: baking soda, salt
1/2 cup dried figs, chopped up
Heat the oven to 350 F. Spread the pine nuts in one layer in a small baking pan; bake until golden brown, 1012 minutes (check after 10 minutes, being careful not to over bake). Cool; coarsely chop. Set nuts aside.
Pour melted butter in a medium bowl; add the brown sugar, granulated sugar and vanilla, stirring until well combined. Stir in the egg and egg yolk. Add the flour, cornmeal, baking soda and salt, stirring until combined. Stir in the figs and reserved pine nuts.
Place racks in upper and lower thirds of the oven.
Put 2-Tbsp mounds of dough 2 inches apart on parchment-lined baking sheets. (A small ice cream scoop can be useful here.) Bake until the cookies are golden-brown, 12 minutes or so, rotating pans midway through baking, if you wish. Let cool to room temperature before serving.
