THE COOKBOOK TEST #0067: THE SCALIDI STORY

INSTALLMENT #0067 (PAID) AN AMERICAN CONVERSATION ABOUT AN ITALIAN COOKIE

Dear Subscribers,

The link between Christmas and cookies is iron-clad and unbreakable. From the iconic plate of cookies left out for Santa (growing up, we used homemade spritz cookies to get the job done) to holiday entertaining to a plate sent over to warm up the holidays of family members and dear friends, they're ambassadors for the season. Cookies are right up there with gifts and corporate marketing in terms of how much they represent end-of-year festivities in America.

My wife Becca and I both grew up making spritz cookies (hers: colorful and all-butter, mine: Scandinavian pale and a butter/Crisco mix), but her family had something that mine did not: Italian heritage, and a very special sort of fried cookie called scalidi.

Her relationship with scalidi is complicated, and that intrigued me, so I took her out for coffee and asked her about their deal.

JAMES NORTON: Describe scalidi for me.

BECCA DILLEY: Scalidi as I know them are an Italian cookie that we only make at Christmas time. It's a complicated process - it's an enriched dough that you wrap around a wooden dowel and then slowly roll out so it becomes very thin, almost like a pasta sheet, but in a circle. It's a big tube with slits in it.

You let it air dry slightly, then you deep fry it and coat it in honey. They're pretty good that day, but the real connoisseurs eat them on the dates that follow because the honey kind of soaks in.

The Italian side of my family has been making them for my whole life, and my great aunt's family had been making them her whole life. But I don't know anyone else who makes them.

NORTON: What are your earliest memories of scalidi?

DILLEY: My mom decided to carry on the tradition of people making scalidi. They're very labor-intensive, and when we would make them it would take an entire day. My mom's generation of cousins was not really engaged in the same way her aunts were. So my mom would invite my Aunt Josie and Aunt Mary to our house and we would spend the whole day making scalidi.

I have a picture of myself in a tiny apron that I think my Aunt Josie made for me, that matched my mom's homemade apron, when I was probably like three.

NORTON: Is it fun to make them?

DILLEY: That's an interesting question, 'is it fun to make them?' Uhm. Most of my memories of making scalidi were from when I was a young teenager through early adulthood. We would drive to Racine, Wisconsin - over two and half hours - and then spend the entire day making scalidi before driving back.