Hussar's Love

Cookies filled or topped with jam can be simple, like a classic thumbprint cookie, or complicated, like a layered, chocolate-glazed Austrian Ischler Törtchen. Wherever they fall on the spectrum, jam cookies are my first choice whether on a cookie plate or in a bakery case. So I was delighted to find that Jim Dodge shares a recipe for a simple yet elegant jam cookie called a Hussar’s Love in The American Baker [1987].

Dodge wrote The American Baker with Elaine Ratner when he served as the pastry chef at San Francisco’s elegant Stanford Court Hotel. His cookbook, which received a James Beard Award, is outstanding. It is precise without being dull and aloof. It presents a broad range of desserts that, to my tastes, are very appealing: a Strawberry Goat Cheese Tart; a Coconut Cream Pie; a Blackberry Cake; and cream Eclairs. In her introduction to Dodge’s cookbook, the pastry chef and cookbook author Maida Heatter writes: “[t]he first word to describe [Dodge’s] desserts is simple: pure and clean in design, and natural and undiluted in taste.”

My copy of The American Baker is full of notes proclaiming that a short dough recipe is my family’s favorite for pies, or that a butter cookie recipe is among one of the best around. I particularly like Dodge’s approach to cookies: they “should be small, perhaps an inch across, so that as you pick up each one you can’t help but look at it and pause in conversation to see how it tastes.” Dodge continues: “I almost never serve just one kind of cookie. I arrange four or five different kinds in neat rows on a small, round, silver pedestal tray and invite guests to pick and choose.”

If invited to help assemble such a tray, I most certainly would include Dodge’s Hussar’s Love: a petite, toasted hazelnut cookie dusted with sugar and topped with a dot of raspberry jam. This tender, buttery cookie is simply delicious.

½ cup toasted hazelnuts (filberts)

7 tablespoons unsalted butter (room temperature)

3 tablespoons sugar

1 ¼ cups cake flour

2 tablespoons powdered sugar

½ cup seedless red raspberry jam

Finely grind the nuts. Cut the butter into pieces. Place the filberts, butter, sugar, and flour in the bowl of an electric mixer. Using the paddle attachment, mix at medium speed until combined and then at medium-high until the dough comes together. Remove the dough from the mixer and divide it into 4 equal parts. Roll each part with your hands into a cylinder 8 inches long and ¾ inch in diameter. Put the cylinders on a tray and refrigerate until firm, about 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 325°F. Line two cookie sheets with parchment.

Cut the cylinders into ¼-inch-thick slices. Place the slices on the cookie sheets and bake until golden brown, 10 to 15 minutes. Remove from the oven and immediately slide the parchment onto a counter or table. Cool to room temperature.

When cool, place the cookies very close together on one sheet. Put the powdered sugar in a shaker or a fine sieve; shake a thin coating of sugar over the cookies. Heat the jam gently until liquid. Pass it through a fine sieve, then spoon it into a parchment cone with a ¼-inch opening cut in the tip. Top each cookie with a dot of jam. Makes 90 cookies.

A few notes and thoughts: I add 1 of the 3 tablespoons of sugar into a food processor when grinding the nuts. This helps prevent the nuts from turning into butter. Cake flour contains less gluten giving these cookies their tender, crumbly texture. This recipe is great for small gatherings, whether your party is simple or more formal.

Liquore latte di vecchia

This is the last post in a short series on homemade Italian liqueurs. Using Maria Pignatelli Ferrante’s Puglia - A Culinary Memoir [2008] as a springboard, we began with a recipe for Rosolio di limone, a bright-tasting, aromatic lemon liqueur. We next explored Nocino, a dark, complex liqueur made with green walnuts picked on 24 June, the Feast Day of St. John the Baptist. The last liqueur in this series is Liquore latte di vecchia or Old Lady’s Milk Liqueur. This curious yet worthwhile cordial is made with fresh milk, citrus, sugar and grain alcohol.

In the United States Liquore latte di vecchia is as obscure as lemon liqueurs are popular. I found two recipes in regional cookbooks from Italy (both recently published in the US by Oronzo Editions): Ferrante’s Puglia and Giuseppe Coria’s Sicily – Culinary Crossroads [2008] translated by Gaetano Cipolla. The great Pellegrino Artusi (Mr. Wilde’s neighbor on this site’s banner) has a recipe in The Science of Cookery and the Art of Eating Well [1891] that, in all but its name, is nearly the same as Liquore latte di vecchia. Artusi’s Rosolio Tedesco (or German Rosolio) contains a “garden lemon,” vanilla, grain alcohol, sugar and milk.

Although Ferrante’s, Coria’s and Artusi’s recipes are similar, they are not identical (not unusual for regional recipes). Ferrante’s and Artusi’s recipes call simply for milk, while Coria’s recipe calls for “goat or other milk, freshly milked”. Ferrante calls for half a lemon, diced, while Coria calls for the “zest of 1 orange or lemon, or vanilla.” Artusi’s recipe calls for both citrus and vanilla.

Artusi writes: “Don’t be taken aback by the strange composition of this rosolio, which is easy to make, delicately flavored, and as clear as water.” Yes, making Liquore latte di vecchia is easy. The only difficulty that you might encounter depends upon how fresh you want your milk. If store-bought milk is fresh enough, then making Liquore latte di vecchia is a breeze. However, if you want to use freshly milked cow or goat milk, then making Liquore latte di vecchia might prove a bit more challenging. Through a helpful lead from my editor, I located an organic dairy in California called Organic Pastures that sells one-day-old raw milk at a local farmer’s market.

Here is Ferrante’s recipe for Liquore latte di vecchia:

½ lemon, diced

5 cups sugar

1 quart milk

1 quart alcohol [pure, distilled]

Drop the lemon pieces into a wide-necked bottle. Add the sugar, the milk, and the alcohol. Seal hermetically and set aside to rest for 15 days, shaking the contents of the bottle every morning and evening. Filter the liqueur, transfer to clean, dry bottles. Hermetically seal the bottles.

A few notes. After adding all of the ingredients expect two things to happen: the lemon will begin to curdle the milk and the ingredients will separate. Be brave. Shaking the concoction over the 15-day infusion period helps dissolve the sugar and integrate the liquids, but do not be surprised if the liquids occasionally separate. Just keep shaking the bottle twice a day and all will be well.

After the 15-day infusion period I filtered the liqueur first through cheesecloth and then through a paper coffee filter. This produced a somewhat clear, slightly milky liquid. A second pass through a paper filter produced a relatively clear liquid, albeit with a slight yellow hue (presumably due to the lemon zest). Certainly compared to milk, this liqueur is, as Artusi puts it, “clear as water.”

Liquore latte di vecchia tastes like all of its ingredients; it is sweet and slightly lemony with a round, creamy flavor. But make no mistake: it packs a wallop (as would any drink using 151 proof alcohol).

As with Nocino, Liquore latte di vecchia rarely makes an appearance at local liquor stores here in the States. But its rarity alone is not a reason to make it. With its unique ingredients and delicate flavor, Liquore latte di vecchia deserves a broader audience. Enjoy it with a fellow Bunburyist of your choice.

Pint-Glass Bread

I am delighted to welcome this site’s first guest Bunburyist. She is an exceptional actor, writer and editor.

I have been editing my dad’s blog for almost the entire time he has been posting recipes. I love to be in the kitchen with him when he cooks, but until recently I have done very little cooking of my own. When Mom and Dad cook so well, it seems silly to add a bumbling newcomer to the kitchen and until a few weeks ago I lived in a dorm with no kitchen and about the same amount of time. Cooking was completely out of the question.

But soon I will be moving into an apartment which means I need to start cooking for myself unless I plan on subsisting entirely on cereal and toast next year (always a possibility, but certainly not the most exciting option). So this summer, I have been stepping out from behind my pencil and dictionary and doing some stirring, simmering and baking for myself.

Right away, there was one thing I knew I wanted to make. In college, I was starved for really good, crusty bread. Our dining hall offered only pre-packaged, pre-sliced loaves with shelf lives only slightly shorter than Twinkies. After that, it wasn’t enough to come home and buy bread at the store—I wanted to make it myself.

However, jumping into the world of yeast when you’ve hardly ever baked a batch of cookies is hardly a wise move so I had little intention of acting on my urge to bake until I happened on a new cookbook my dad had bought while I was away at college.

The Country Cooking of Ireland [2009] by Colman Andrews is my favorite type of cookbook. It is beautiful (I consider the pictures of cows and Irish countryside alone worth the cost of the book) and filled with information about the culture and history of Ireland and its cooking. It was while reading through this book that I came across a chapter that solved my bread dilemma: soda bread. Dense and crusty enough to make up for a year’s worth of industrial slices of foam, it’s also simple enough for a novice with more enthusiasm than skill and doesn’t require any finicky yeast wrangling.

So I determined to give it a try, still somewhat convinced that disaster would befall. But, amazingly, it turned out! The recipe was simple but immensely satisfying. (Anything that involves shaping your hand into a claw and running it through something sticky can’t help but satisfy your inner five-year-old.) and I got a rush of pride out of successfully baking a loaf of bread that was entirely out of proportion with the difficulty of the recipe.

Suddenly cooking wasn’t just a way to feed myself while away at school studying Oscar Wilde and James Joyce, but something pleasurable and satisfying enough to do simply for the fun of it. And I can’t wait to do more.

This bread was meant to be made by a college student armed only with a pint glass and some sort of bowl (the recipe suggests a wash basin or even the kitchen sink). As I don’t fit the mold of pint-glass wielding collegiates, I used the measurements accompanying the recipe. They worked quite well although they lacked the haphazard charm of the pint glass method.

Pint-Glass Bread

• 1 pint glass [2 ½ cups/250 g] white flour, preferably Irish or pastry flour, plus more for dusting
• 1 pint glass [2 ½ cups/250 g] stone-ground whole wheat flour, preferably Irish or Irish-style
• Enough baking soda to coat the bottom of a pint glass [ ¾ tsp]
• Enough salt to coat the bottom of a pint glass [ ¾ tsp]
• Enough butter to coat the bottom of a pint glass [1 tbsp]
• ¾ pint glass [1 ¾ cups/420 ml] room-temperature buttermilk, plus more as needed

Preheat the oven to 375°F/190°C (Gas Mark 5).

Sift the white flour, whole wheat flour, baking soda, and salt together in a medium bowl and stir together with a fork until they’re well combined. Rub the butter in with your fingers until the mixture resembles bread course bread crumbs.

Form a well in the middle of the flour mixture and pour the buttermilk into the well. Form your hand into a rigid claw and stir the buttermilk into the flour slowly but steadily in a spiral motion, starting in the middle and working outward. The dough should be soft but not too wet or sticky. (Add more buttermilk if necessary.)

Turn the dough out onto a floured board. Flour your hands lightly, then shape the dough into a flat round about 2 in/5 cm high. Cut a deep cross in the top of the loaf with a wet or floured knife, then bake for 45 to 60 minutes, or until nicely browned and the bottom of the loaf sounds hollow when tapped.

Andrews gives an entire page of pointers to help ensure successful bread. Mainly though, you want to make sure not to over-mix the dough and not to undercook the bread.

Resist the urge to cut into the bread until it is entirely cool (I couldn’t the first time); it results in a better texture and the bread is best at room temperature anyway. This bread tastes amazing with honey, good cheese, jam or dipped in soup such as the Potato and Leek posted on this blog.