The Legacy of a Recipe
How my late grandmother’s biscotti recipe taught me what it means to be Italian then, now, and forever.
During a move last year, a deep clean of my kitchen revealed a small box containing a selection of my grandmother’s recipes. Among them were the preparation steps for her famous biscotti. Staring down at the creased stationary, I was moved by the thin, etched handwriting.
While some losses become easier to bear over time, others grow harder. My Nana passed away when I was too young to have the perspective to ask about her life the way I wish I could now. The best of her is preserved in these recipes. Something of an heirloom in our family, this combination of ingredients defined so much of who she was and the way she brought people together. I’ve never been much of a talent in the kitchen–but Nana sure was. Feeling connected to her and her Italian heritage is getting harder as the years go by, but I wondered if by trying to learn this recipe, she could still teach me something about what it means to be a part of this culture.
“Nonna” is the Italian word for grandmother. It’s pronounced like the name Donna but with an accentuated “aw” sound over the letter o, giving it the classic diphthong that characterizes the Italian accent. As kids, my brother and I could never get it right and our best articulation of the word came out something like, “Nuh-nuh.” This used to make my dad’s sweet mother smile. She signed her cards, “Nana,” spelling this rendition of her title, more in line with Italian phonetics than English.
Her recipes have a soundtrack in my mind. Each dish, recorded in the flowing strokes of her penmanship, is tied to a Dean Martin album where I hear Nana singing along into a battered wooden spoon, the staccato of each word bouncing off her shimmering, lined lips.
“What’s comb-o-bella chell a-luna?” I’d ask, repeating the foreign lyrics back to her as best I could.
“Com'è bella c'è la luna!” She’d repeat, her hand motioning to draw out each of the syllables. I’d mouth the words silently, trying to mimic the way her tongue formed the sounds. “It means, how beautiful is the moon!”
While many of my Italian lessons featured vocabulary from Dean Martin, “Mangi!” is the first Italian word I remember learning from her; it’s the command to eat.
In my own kitchen now, more than a decade later, I was unfamiliar with several of Nana’s listed ingredients (anisette, anyone?). Fumbling through the first few steps of the recipe, I felt embarrassed at the clumsy motions of my hands. I spilled the sugar, splashed vanilla across my shirt, and nearly mistook baking powder for baking soda.
Squinting my eyes, I held the folded cardstock up to a light to try and decipher my next steps. “2 Tbs. Anise Seed” was crossed out, correcting itself to “4 desired,” with a note in the margin suggesting to “slightly crush.” I felt like I was brewing a potion, carefully following the instructions in the ancient book before me.
While new to me, anise is not new to biscotti. Speaking with Maximilian Henkel, a professional in the food industry and historian of Italian cuisine, I learned anise was a common baking ingredient. Believed to be a digestive aid, it was woven into the fabric of Italian culinary tradition.
The biscotti cookie originated during the Roman Empire where it served as a hardtack for soldiers as it could be preserved easily and traveled well. With the proliferation of the Empire, so spread biscotti and new adaptations of it. Common flavors vary widely to include almond and anise, like Nana’s, or chocolate, fig, and pistachio.
As (slightly) crushed anise seeds scattered across the countertop and rolled onto the floor, I pictured Nana throwing her hands in the air, shouting a low, rattling “Owh! Owh!” If Nana were here, however, I wouldn’t be spilling anything over the counter. I’d be letting the master work while I sat safely at the kitchen table, waiting patiently with my grandpa.
Grandpa was Nana’s perfectly balanced partner. I don’t remember him before the Parkinson’s disease, but I know he was an Army man and later, quite the golfer. Nana was the opposite of his slow, shaky motions. While Grandpa would sit quietly in his favorite upholstered recliner, golf on the TV, she’d dart quickly around the house: cooking, serving, tidying.
“Are you through?” she’d ask, taking the empty dish from his lap before he could answer. “No. I’ll bring you some more.”
You were never through eating at Nana’s house because Nana was never through cooking.
I swept up the rouge anise seeds and readied my space for the final step of the recipe. It read, “Blend together and add to above;” then, a note across the bottom:
Bake 350°
35-40 minutes
I stared down at my blended ingredients: a soft lump of dough in the center of a glass bowl. Wait, I thought. I imagined myself plopping the glass bowl into the oven. I’m no chef, but I knew that wasn’t right. How do I make the little biscotti shapes?
Diverging from Nana’s notes, I borrowed another nonna from YouTube and watched as the sweet Italian woman removed her ball of dough from the bowl, cut it into halves, and rolled
out two strips of dough, pressing them into even loaves on the baking sheet with her hands. Nana probably did this so naturally, she never needed to write it down. Sinking my fingers into the soft, sticky dough, I shaped each loaf carefully and slid the pan into the oven.
The word “biscotti” comes from Latin roots meaning “twice cooked,” named for the method of first baking the dough as a loaf, then slicing, flipping, and returning the cookies to the oven once more to give them that characteristically crunchy texture. Nana’s recipe, however, made no mention of this.
Watching the timer count down, I wondered how Nana’s first biscotti trial went and how much living in the United States influenced the recipe after my family’s immigration.
The Library of Congress records that by 1920, the US welcomed more than 4 million Italian immigrants, making up more than 10% of the country’s foreign-born population. While the largest single ethnic group, that didn’t mean an easy transition for newcomers.
A blend of her parent’s native Italian and the English of her upbringing in rural West Virginia, Nana’s accent was uniquely her own. As kids, she and her siblings got teased for the way they spoke. Sometimes, neighborhood bullies would throw rocks through the windows of their house. Great-grandpa Vito was something of a moonshiner and would smooth over tensions with a mason jar of homebrew.
I wish Nana had also passed down that recipe.
The ding! of the oven came several minutes after the house was filled with a warm, familiar aroma. Opening the oven door, I reached out a careful hand and gently pressed the
rounded top of the small loaf closest to me. It was soft yet rightly firm and a beautiful golden brown. I removed the tray, let it cool, and brewed some coffee.
Using a large kitchen knife, I carefully divided the biscotti into even slices. The snap of each cut was satisfying, making clean divisions in my loaf and dusting my countertop with a small trail of crumbs.
Picking up the small, oblong cookie, I dipped it in the mug of black coffee beside me and sunk my teeth into it with a delightful crunch. In that first bite, I was taken aback by an unfamiliar yet wholly recognizable taste; one that had long characterized Nana’s cooking. I felt sucked back in time–back to her oaky kitchen with the wicker chairs. Under the gentle almond and vanilla flavors was a darker, heavier, almost bitter tone. It was the anise. I was nostalgic for a taste I didn’t know I missed.
After several repeats of the recipe, my biscotti had a richer color, crisper texture, and an entirely better shape. I was feeling good about my close-to-perfect batch and wanted to share my accomplishment with someone I knew would appreciate it as much as I did. So, I boarded a westbound flight to Arizona with a carefully packed Tupperware of biscotti in my carry-on to deliver to the ultimate taste-tester: my dad. I wanted to see if my rendition measured up to his mother’s.
“Your mom’s biscotti!” my mother sighed, looking up at my dad as I carried my precious batch into her kitchen. She turned to me. “Your Nana would be so happy you made this.”
“Well, try it first,” I laughed, peeling back the rubber lid. A rich aroma arose.
Dad gingerly picked up the first piece, dunked it in his coffee, and took a bite. He sighed. “Mhmm. Perfect!”
My Dad, like his father, is a man of few words, but I heard the validation in his tone. He closed his eyes and smiled gently as he took the next bite. Mom asked if we’d all get a jar for Christmas the way Nana used to gift them, in a recycled glass container with a red ribbon tied around the top. I was too young to remember how the neighbors would line up in anticipation, but Mom does.
“Oh my god.” My brother’s voice shot up. “That’s the Nana flavor!”
I laughed, knowing exactly what he meant. It was the anise he was talking about. As a kid, I couldn’t place the strange, dark flavor that laced so many of Nana’s recipes together. It was a taste I didn’t know outside of her kitchen. I couldn’t place it then, but I know now it’s the flavor of a black licorice. I know now, it’s anise.
Sharing my recipe with Henkel, we discussed how the use of anise was common, but Nana included more than most. Nonetheless, that, combined with her use of almonds, allowed him a precise guess at where my family was from: the southernmost tip of Italy.
So, was this the truest, most Italian form of the recipe? Shelves of my local grocery stores feature a wide variety of biscotti, I doubt “pumpkin spice” was a traditional flavor of medieval Italy.
Turns out, “truest, most Italian” varies depending on whom you ask.
Henkel calls “Italian” cuisine a concept, and a fluid one at that. He laughs, adding that you could ask five Italians how to prepare any given dish and get seven different answers.
Speaking with Ethan Murphy, a culinary professional in Italy, I asked how authenticity is defined and whether it's inherited through strict adherence or created through evolutions of a recipe. He answered: both, explaining the fierce competitiveness of Italians over the “correctness” of their recipes–and how “correctness” can vary from town to town. For instance, in his home of Bologna, the bolognese sauce for which the city is named is meat-based, but just further south, it’s prepared with tomatoes–an insult to the north. While many Italians characteristically reject alterations of their own cherished recipes, wide and persistent variations exist nonetheless.
In New York, bakers at The Biscotti Company follow a 200-year-old family recipe yet “continue to evolve and diversify biscotti,” they say, underscoring its cultural significance, even in varied forms and flavors. Henkel and Murphy agree that these variations aren’t wrong and instead identify them as more continuations in the evolution that has allowed the survival of these centuries-old traditions. “Authenticity is in the eyes of the beholder,” says Murphy.
Perhaps connecting with my grandmother’s heritage isn’t about merely copying her steps perfectly but rather understanding them well enough to connect with the essence of her recipe and build upon it. After all, what makes Nana’s biscotti special is the uniqueness of it–the distinct way she made it her own. Biscotti, from its inception, has never stopped evolving.
In this vein, I returned to the recipe once more. Working through the steps with an earned familiarity, I kept the anisette but traded the anise extract for hazelnut. Where Nana’s notes crossed out two tablespoons of anise seed in favor of four, I decided to try three. I increased the amount of crushed almonds.
The result was authentically Nana, yet distinctly me. The “Nana flavor,” as my brother put it, was still there, but now it was balanced with something that felt like it belonged to me.
Culture isn’t stagnant. It adapts, survives, and takes on new shapes while preserving the authentic spirit of its roots and traditions; it’s something that lives on through generations because it’s alive. And now, more than ever, Nana’s biscotti recipe feels alive to me, too.
Graduate journalism coursework, Harvard University / 2024
