One of the great chafes of life is lost food. When my family visited Italy in nineteen ninety and seven, we ate some really good cookies in Sienna. They were crisp on the outside, soft on the inside with perfect almond flavor, the kind the explodes in your mouth and then slowly dissipates. Fuckhead that I am, I failed to write down the name of the brand or even the type of cookie, and ever since whenever I visit a store selling Italian products I look for the cookies. I also ask Italians that I meet about Sienna cookies and they give me blank looks. The cookies are probably really from Palermo or something. Anyway, in addition to looking through Euro-stores, I check out cookie cookbooks. I saw something promising in the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion and made them. The cookies were okay, but not the Sienna cookies. The King Arthur book on the other hand is great. It gives lots of detail on tools, preperation, the science of cookie cooking and variations, such as how to make a cakey vs. a fudgy brownie. None of this guidance made me a better cookie chef, but I think I am missing a baking gene. When my wife made cookies from the book, they were excellent, so check it out.
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
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6 comments:
T:
If the cookies were diamond/oval shaped, and crisp on the outside/soft inside they may have been "ricciarelli di siena." If they were round and more chewy, they may have been some species of macaroon from the Piedmont; check these props for the Italian Baker by Carol Field:
http://food4.epicurious.com/HyperNews/get/archive_swap30101-30200/30184/3.html
b
Thanks B! I think they are Piedmontese macaroon, based on that website. They have a macaroon like taste, but more subtle and with a different mouthfeel. Now I can pester Italians for Piedmontese macaroons!
By the way, you're not going to go all Proustian with this cookie-from-the-past thing, are you?
Wouldn't that require me to recall all the feelings I had as took each bite and then the wistful remembrance of each cookie?
No I shan't go that far, but my powerful food memory will lead me to drag to the surface all kinds of random mental flotsam and jetsam.
T
Jo,
Congrats on your trophy, I hope your baking has progressed since then though.
The Pix/Bar Pastiche cookies were very similar, but we had strange flavors like Port. I would need a plain one to tell if they were the things I am talking about. Get this, they were packaged cookies, but packaged cookies in Italy aren't nutter butters let me tell you.
Prizes go to the longest blog comments so type away.
T
Yes, A Valomilk is the perfect prize. I am bummed I am missing that Pix party it looks sweet. It's not the pretty paper macaroon that you mentionas I have had those, but it is something similar. I think I need to go down to that deli on 10th SW that has lots of Euro food and try all the macaroons to perfectly triangulate.
Now, to the road.
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