The caption on the Facebook photo I posted 9 years ago says- “It begins here with a dozen eggs, a pound of lard, & some sugar, and a kilo+ of flour.” That’s the recipe for my family’s biscotti that I have in my mind, always, as the holidays arrive. But isn’t there baking powder? And yes, there is anise seed and anise flavoring; and don’t forget Grandma always put walnuts and maraschino cherries in half of the batch because it was Christmas.
So I dance my Nonna’s Biscotti dance that I do every year, as I try to recreate that nostalgic smell and texture of the homemade anise seed biscotti that my mother’s mother—Julia DiPietrantonio made for us. Julia was born in America, but her mother, Petronella DiPietrantonio—a young widow with a son—came in the great wave of Italian immigrants just after the turn of the century from a very small hilltop village, Roccamorice, in the Abruzzo region of Italy, along its mountainous spine.
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