Biscotti di Santa Lucia:
My Grandmother's Card

One clarification before anything else, because the word travels badly. These are not the hard, twice-baked biscotti sold next to coffee in America. They are soft-baked cut-out cookies, rolled and stamped, and the word biscotti here is simply the Italian for cookies.

In the piece we wrote about Santa Lucia and the thirteenth of December we said we would publish this before the twelfth, which is the only week of the year it is any use to anyone. So here it is.

The condition is in that article too, and it is not a marketing device. These get made until the thirteenth of December and then they stop. Not because anything bad happens if you make them in January, but because the stopping is the point. A cookie you can have whenever you want is a cookie, and this is the other thing.

What Is Actually on the Card

Written exactly as she wrote it, with the conversions underneath in our words rather than hers.

1 kg flour. 4 etti margarine. 4 etti sugar. 1 lievito. 2 egg yolks. A little milk. Salt. A little rum.

In American measures that is about 8 cups of all-purpose flour, 14 ounces of margarine, which is three and a half sticks, 2 cups of granulated sugar, one 16 gram sachet of Italian lievito per dolci or about 4 teaspoons of baking powder, 2 egg yolks, and milk, salt and rum in quantities the card leaves to you.

One sachet for a kilo of flour is deliberate, and it is worth saying so, because it is roughly half of what a sachet is normally calibrated for. The standard indication is one 16 gram sachet per 500 grams of flour, which would make 30 grams the usual amount for a kilo. The card asks for one. Resist the urge to correct it.

The Italian sachet is worth hunting down if you want the dough she made, because the standard one is vanilla-scented and that note ends up in the cookie. Paneangeli is carried on Amazon in the United States and by several Italian grocery importers. Plain American baking powder works at the same weight and simply leaves the vanilla out, which a little vanilla extract alongside the rum will put back.

Then the method, which is ten lines:

Make a well with the flour and the baking powder. Put in the margarine, the sugar, the yolks, a little milk, a pinch of salt and a little rum. Work it well but not too much. If it needs it, add another drop of milk. Let it rest a while somewhere cool. Then roll it out, not too thin. Cut the cookies with the cutters and put them on the baking sheet. Bake in a hot oven until they go golden. Dust with confectioners' sugar.

One kilo of flour is a great deal of cookies. Depending on how small your cutters are you are looking at something close to a hundred, which is correct for the occasion and probably not correct for a Tuesday. Halving it works: 500 grams of flour, 200 of margarine, 200 of sugar, half the sachet and one yolk.

Margarine, and Why It Says Margarine

An American reader will stop at that word, so it is worth being direct about it.

Margarine is what was in Italian kitchens when this card was written. It was cheaper than butter and it was what you used for a batch this size, and nobody in the house thought of it as a compromise. Changing the word now would make the card tidier and would also make it somebody else's recipe.

So it stays as written. If you want to use butter, it goes in one for one at the same weight, and the cookie will be a little richer and will color a little faster. That sentence is ours, not hers.

There Is No Single Santa Lucia Cookie

If you look up the Veronese version in English you will find it, and you will find that it does not match this one.

The published versions tend to use butter and vanilla, no raising agent at all, and a cooler oven at around 160°C for a quarter of an hour. That makes a proper shortbread: crisp, short, snapping cleanly.

This card has baking powder in it, uses rum where the published versions use vanilla, and goes into a hotter oven. The lift is slight rather than cakey, for the reason above, so what comes out is a shortcrust with a little give in it rather than one that snaps cleanly.

The vanilla is a smaller difference than it looks. Italian baking powder is usually vanilla-scented, so there is vanilla in this dough as well, arriving through the sachet instead of through a spoon. With plain American baking powder it will not be there, and a little vanilla alongside the rum brings it closer. That note is ours.

Neither one is the correct version. They are two houses in the same province doing the same thing on the same night.

That is worth saying because the internet tends to produce one canonical recipe per dish and then defend it. The actual tradition is a thousand of these cards, each slightly different, each the only correct one inside its own kitchen.

The Shapes

The cutters in our house were a star, a moon, a little angel, a Christmas tree and a bell.

Four of those five belong to her rather than to Christmas. The star and the moon are the night she travels in. The angel is how she is drawn. And the bell is the sound: she goes through the streets ringing one, which is the signal for children to get themselves to bed, and in the two weeks before the thirteenth it is the noise that ends every evening. A child who cuts a bell out of dough in the afternoon has already heard it.

The tree is the only one that belongs to the twenty-fifth. It gets in there anyway, because the cutters live in the same tin.

What They Are For

They are not dessert, and they do not go out on a plate after dinner.

They sit on the table on the night of the twelfth, with a glass of milk, for Santa Lucia to find when she comes through. There is usually a glass of wine beside them for the Gastaldo, who walks with her, and something for the donkey: hay, or flour, or a carrot. In the morning the cookies are gone and there are presents.

Which means they are also the last thing a child does before being sent to bed on the one night of the year they genuinely want to go. That is the job they are doing, and it is not a baking job.