Pignoli? By George, I Finally Got It

An occasional series in which staff members share a recipe that we turn to time and again:

One of my favorite movie moments comes in "My Fair Lady" when Eliza Doolittle, after months of arduous work to learn proper English, correctly pronounces, "The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain."

"By George, she's got it!" Henry Higgins exults.

My rain-in-Spain moment came last December when, after years of failed attempts and then a period of not even trying, I cracked the code of my grandmother's pignoli -- or "pinule," as she insisted on saying -- cookie recipe.

My four sisters and I grew up with these cookies. We ate them like gumdrops. As any aficionado of Italian baking will tell you, they are indescribably delectable -- nutty and toasty on the outside and soft and creamy on the inside. They get their name from the pine nut, or pignolo (the plural of that, pignoli, is pronounced peen-YOH-lee). It's a tiny, creamy-white seed full of fat and when roasted reminds me of an almond that's gone on an all-night bender.

They are deceptively hard to make, considering that the recipe basically calls for mixing almond paste with egg whites and sugar, forming little balls and adorning them with the pine nuts.

My first long-ago effort was a gooey disaster. My encore attempt resulted in hard little hockey pucks. The third effort was cookies stuck fast to the cookie sheet.

Over the years I periodically would take a stab at the cookies. Part of me wondered whether I even had the right directions. My grandmother didn't believe in recipes. She judged her cooking by how it looked and felt. At one point while still waging the good fight, I consulted cookbooks and tried other recipes. Some used flour or confectioners' sugar or more pignoli, but they just didn't look or taste like my grandmother's.

Eventually I gave up. Almond paste and pine nuts are pretty expensive, and I was getting tired of tossing all that money down the garbage disposal. I also didn't appreciate the derision I would always get from my children as they turned up their noses and said "these don't taste like Grandma Annie's." Finally, why go to all the trouble when my grandmother was glad to make the cookies herself?

Which she did until she was 99. And then one morning while making lunch, she fell and hit her head. After that, her children decided she could no longer be left alone in the house where she lived by herself, thus beginning both a sad and joyous time for me.

Since she didn't want to leave her home, the family set up a system in which someone would always be with her. Mostly, the burden fell on my mother, so I started to fly home to Albany, N.Y., every other month or so to give my mother a break and to keep company with my grandmother.

The first time I went back and walked into her kitchen, I was struck by the memories of my childhood: a pot of tomatoes always on a slow burner, thickening into sauce. The steady stream of aunts and uncles and second cousins crowding around her table. The sharp tang of Parmesan cheese being hand-grated. The magical way she made popcorn in a simple saucepan with the lid rapidly rising but the kernels never spilling.