Everything I Need to Know

I learned from baking Italian cookies (and my mother).

I stand at my butcher block kitchen island, mixing sticky dough for pizzelles. After whisking the eggs and vanilla, I blend in the white sugar slowly. The removal of the whisk brings a dollop of batter to the counter. My fingers don’t hesitate to swipe at it, lick it up. It’s familiar. It’s healing. Right here, I recognize the batter for what it was. And I sense, everything I need to know, I learned baking Italian cookies, and from my mother. But not necessarily at her side.

Photo from Giallo Zafferano. But the tea cup could have belonged to my mother.

1. Uovo sbattuto cures all. The batter above is what healed us from all sicknesses when we were little. If we fell ill with colds or flu, Mom would sneak in our bedrooms, offer us a glass of blended egg, sugar, and vanilla. It’s known as uovo sbattuto, or beaten egg, and the vanilla was often replaced by a Marsala or other sweet wine. One could say it hewed closely to zabaglione. Perhaps we were being schooled—at a young age—learning one’s true Italian tastes.

2. Break life down into manageable pieces. My mother’s recipes could be intimidating. The large quantities often scared me off. I’m not sure I’ve ever baked anything where I needed five pounds of flour. All I can do is imitate her in smaller doses. My world is more digestible that way.

Cannoli notes

3. What is left behind might surprise us. I never fail to laugh at the notes in my mother’s recipes, in odd correspondence I came across that was saved. Littles notes to one self. We think our long missives will be added to the canon of literature on living life. But the little scraps might be more important.

The nut horns with pecans.

4. We all get to choose what kind of nuts to enjoy. In many of recipes, the specific types nuts to use are presented as choices, as is the fact nuts are optional. Pecan, walnut, chestnuts, pinenuts. There are always nuts in my pantry, which would not have been the case for my mother, given their expense. However, every day, I toss them into some dish, or into my palms. When I’ve not hit my requisite protein percentage for the day, the nuts go down in the win column.

5. We have to live in the world we’ve made. My oven differs from my mother’s in temperament, style, amount of grease on the glass window, and maybe by about 2 degrees. Updating her recipes happens typically when I have to adjust for temperature differences. She baked her cookies in the basement, where she could easily control the humidity (with dehumidifier), the noise and the foot traffic. I have to account for car horns, loud trucks, and the occasionally shuttering of a newer HVAC system in an old house. Sometimes, our worlds collide, other times not.

6. The kitchen is never clean. Despite housing second kitchen in the basement, my mother attempted, to no avail, to keep her upstairs kitchen clean. No messes of flour, no sugar sprinkles to slide on later. All that was contained in the lower level. Still, she could never account for when we did eat those cookies. Long after the holidays, kids on the go, returning to college or elsewhere, we might stash the final cookie in our mouths and leave a few crumbs behind on the sunburst linoleum floor. The kitchen was never clean, but the cookies lived on.

7. Sometimes you need a sharp knife. Seriously, more often that not, I am in need of a sharp knife, it’s point to help lift the pizzelles out of the iron, to draw slits into the bow ties, to cut dough as one might with a pastry cutter, but you can’t find the pastry cutter, so a sharp knife will have to do. It’s not all rolling pins and soft landings into flour in a kitchen of cookie makers.

8. Use your time to shine. My mother made more than a dozen varieties at Christmastime. In any one year, she might have far exceeded even that number. When guests came to call, they might bring cookies at their own peril. My mother would slyly suggest, “I’ll keep these for the kids, they get tired of mine (not true),” and she would shift them out of view. She didn’t plan to be outshined by anyone inside or outside the house.

9. Know when to bring back the standards. Our two-year-old granddaughter is arriving this year, along with an aunt who I knows loves to make cookies and decorate. A few years ago, I bought sweater cookie cutouts, and we held an ugly Christmas sweater cookie decorating contest. This year, I’ll bring back some standard snowmen and stockings to add to the mix for decoration. A reversion to our childhood is never bad thing.

10. Let go of your own creations. This week, I texted my sister, asked if she’d bring a few cookies from the Italian bakery (I knew she planned on it anyhow). We LOVED our mother’s cookies. Sometimes, we wanted to eat cookies we know didn’t crush the maker to get it done. I scaled back this year, with one or two more to go. But I’m sure looking forward to the Italian wedding cookies, also known Russian tea cakes, that will accompany my sister.

The potential for this list is endless. Most importantly, I always save some cookies for myself. Later, cleaning out the refrigerator, I’ll see a few stragglers of totos or nut horns in their containers, move them together and condense their confines, until they nearly become one hardened cookie left behind. Like the loaves of bread discovered beneath Mt. Vesuvius, the more coarsened the cookie, the more I know it will survive long past me.

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May your blessings be bright as we end this year. I’m looking forward to connecting with my readers once more again in the new year.