By Jo-Ann Armao
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
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.
I realized that I was about the same age as my grandmother as she appears in my earliest memories of her and that now, half a century later, I would be forming my last memories of her.
I didn't want those memories to be of her sitting idle in a corner. So I decided we were going to cook together, something we had never attempted to do since I was 10 years old and dropped an egg on her floor -- a mortal sin to a woman who viewed milk gone sour as an opportunity to make chocolate cake.
We started with bread. And over the next 20 months, we roasted chickens, made chocolate balls and fried dough. We even made falione , a complicated meat and cheese pie that is a traditional dish for Italians at Easter. And I watched as she made her pignoli cookies, my only role being to remove them from the oven. Two years ago, my grandmother died at age 101.
Which brings me to my Eliza Doolittle moment. I was determined to give these cookies another shot. I figured I owed it to my grandmother. Also, I had picked up a few tricks from watching her make them. But more importantly, my grandmother had given me the real secret: Never be afraid. Try again. "You are bigger . . . and smarter," I remember her saying.
She had empowered me. And this time, my cookies were delicious.
Anna Stellato's Pignoli
Makes about 40 cookies
My grandmother called them pinules. Use raw pine nuts and store them in the refrigerator or the freezer; otherwise, they can go bad easily. A couple of tips I learned the hard way: use canned almond paste, such as Solo brand, not almond filling or almond paste in a tube (it's too crumbly), and under no circumstances use marzipan. And refrigerate the dough overnight; skip that step at your own peril.
8-ounce can almond paste
1 1/4 cups sugar
2 egg whites, at room temperature
4 to 5 tablespoons pine nuts
Using a stand mixer on low speed, add the almond paste and some of the sugar and mix to break up the chunks of almond paste. Add the remainder of the sugar and mix until blended, then add the egg whites and mix just until the dough is smooth (you want to mix, not pulverize). Shape dough into a ball. It will be moist and sticky. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.
Position a rack in the upper third of the oven and preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Have ready 2 rimmed baking sheets lined with parchment paper.
Roll the dough into balls a little bigger than marbles. Press 6 to 8 pine nuts into each piece. As you do this, slightly flatten the top, but leave the center slightly mounded. Place dough on the prepared baking sheets.
Bake one sheet at a time for 15 to 20 minutes or until lightly brown (don't let the cookies get dark brown). Let sit on baking sheet for about 5 minutes, then transfer with a spatula to a rack to cool completely. Cookies can be stored in an airtight container with wax paper between layers for about 2 weeks or can be frozen for about 3 months.
Per serving: 54 calories, 1 g protein, 9 g carbohydrates, 2 g fat, 0 mg cholesterol, 0 g saturated fat, 3 mg sodium, 0 g dietary fiber
Recipe tested by Marcia Kramer; e-mail questions tofood@washpost.com
Jo-Ann Armao, former assistant managing editor for metropolitan news, is on leave as a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University.
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