Recreating Grandma Minnie's Mountains of Italian Christmas Cookies

Everyone has foods that take them on mental journeys. The best thing of all is that there is room at the table for them all.
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Courtesy of Chris Morocco

These six cookies bring me back to Worcester, Massachusetts, circa 1988, with Duraflame logs in the fireplace and Mitch Miller booming from the turntable. Velour couches, candy bowls full of Hershey’s Kisses, gallon jugs of my grandfather’s punchy basement Zinfandel, and a china cabinet that rattled so loudly my cousins and I would compete to see who could set it rocking and tittering the most when running past.

My grandmother, Erminia “Minnie” Morocco, treated Christmas cookies like a form of currency. She was obsessed with counting everything and anything she made. “145 biscotti this year!” she would bellow. “204 pizzettes!” They were currency to her kids and grandkids as well. A few Ziploc bags of her cookies in the freezer could get us through the holidays and well into the New Year when rationed carefully. Chewy-soft molasses-y hermit slices with the faintest sheen of browned butter glaze. Pizzettes, whose strange name has always been synonymous with the chocolate, spice, and citrus flavors that simply meant Christmas to us Italians. Her spritz cookies were buttery magic to me, miracles of uniformity and green sprinkles, the gateway cookie that I fell for as soon as I could eat solid food. Most were served by the hundreds if not thousands at every major family event I can think of, piled in tiers on banquet tables and protected from premature eating by elaborate ruffles of bound plastic wrap. They were there for as long as I could remember. Until they weren’t.

Mountains of Minnie's cookies at a family wedding.

Courtesy of Chris Morocco

When my grandmother passed away in 2014, she left behind some recipes, but nobody stepped forward to follow in her footsteps and become pop-up cookie factories whenever the need arose. Maybe we made one or two in the few years since her death, but we didn’t even come close to her output. The original recipes, written in her meticulous cursive, were curiously devoid of detail. “Mix well. Bake until done.” Ingredient quantities changed in different family members’ transcriptions. None of this is surprising given that cooking with my grandma was a bit like the first day of an apprenticeship to Gordon Ramsay. Even after agreeing to do a demo, she woke up long before you did and baked everything by 8 a.m., a form of psychological warfare against the laziness of every generation that came after hers. She didn’t mind yelling if it got her point across. “We don’t skip steps!” she once commanded after I tried to jump from the #6 setting right to the #4 setting of the pasta roller when making lasagna together. Most of us never showed up for the second day.

Cookies wrapped in plastic wrap (to deter snack-sneakers) at my mother's engagement party.

Courtesy of Chris Morocco

So being a food editor and all, I thought it was finally time to re-create them in the BA Test Kitchen and see, years after having tasted them, if the old magic was still there. The first step was getting my hands on the recipes. My phone pinged nonstop for a solid week back in October as my aunt Denise searched for recipes and my mom flipped through photo albums.

After many years of putting food up for tasting by other editors, it isn’t often I get nervous. But these recipes were personal. I cooked them all several times before letting anybody else in the Test Kitchen try them, adjusting and tweaking as I went. The only ones that truly deviled me were the Italian wedding cookies. They should be fragrant with anise and kept moist and cakey by a thin layer of icing. But they came out heavy, albeit with perfectly domed tops. Perhaps they had always been this way, but I wanted a slightly lighter cookie, even if that meant a few cracks across their tops (sorry Grandma!). A little time in the fridge to rest and chill the dough before baking took care of most of it, but the cookies are now just as I recall them, with a flavor that pulls me back to 1988, then forward to the present, with many stops in between.

Everyone has foods that take them on mental journeys. The best thing of all is that there is room at the table for them all. These are mine: